A VOICE near his foot said: "Got a cigarette?" He drew quickly back and trod on an arm. A voice said imperatively: "Water, quick," as if whoever it was thought he could take a stranger unawares, and make him fork out.
   "Got a cigarette?"
   "No." He said weakly: "I have nothing at all," and imagined he could feel enmity fuming up all round him like smoke. He moved again. Somebody said: "Look out for the bucket." That was where the stench came from. He stood perfectly still and waited for his sight to return. Outside the rain began to stop: it dropped haphazardly and the thunder moved away. You could count forty now between the lightning flash and the roll. Forty miles, superstition said. Half-way to the sea, or half-way to the mountains. He felt around with his foot, trying to find [115] enough space to sit down—but there seemed to be no room at all. When the lightning went on he could see the hammocks at the edge of the courtyard.
   "Got something to eat?" a voice said, and when he didn't answer, "Got something to eat?"
   "No."
   "Got any money?" another voice said.
   "No."
   Suddenly, from about five feet away, there came a tiny scream—a woman's. A tired voice said: "Can't you be quiet?" Among the furtive movements came again the muffled painless cries. He realized with horror that pleasure was going on even in this crowded darkness. Again he put out his foot and began to edge his way inch by inch away from the grille. Behind the human voices another noise went permanently on: it was like a small machine, an electric belt set at a certain tempo. It filled any silences that there were, louder than human breath. It was the mosquitoes.
   He had moved perhaps six feet from the grille, and his eyes began to distinguish heads—perhaps the sky was clearing: they hung around him like gourds. A voice said: "Who are you?" He made no reply, feeling panic, edging in: suddenly he found himself against the back wall: the stone was wet against his hand—the cell could not have been more than twelve feet deep. He found he could just sit down if he kept his feet drawn up under him. An old man lay slumped against his shoulder: he told his age from the feather-weight lightness of the bones, the feeble uneven flutter of the breath. He was either somebody close to birth or death—and he could hardly be a child in this place. He said suddenly: "Is that you, Catarina?" and his breath went out in a long patient sigh, as if he had been waiting for a long while and could afford to wait a lot longer.
   The priest said: "No. Not Catarina." When he spoke everybody became suddenly silent, listening, as if what he said had importance: then the voices and movements began again. But the sound of his own voice, the sense of communication with a neighbour, calmed him.
   "You wouldn't be," the old man said. "I didn't really think you were. She'll never come."
   "Is she your wife?"
   [116] "What's that you're saying? I haven't got a wife."
   "Catarina."
   "She's my daughter." Everybody was listening again: except the two invisible people who were concerned only in their hooded and cramped pleasure.
   "Perhaps they won't allow her here."
   "She'll never try," the old hopeless voice pronounced with absolute conviction. The priest's feet began to ache, drawn up under his haunches. He said: "If she loves you ..." Somewhere across the huddle of dark shapes the woman cried again—that finished cry of protest and abandonment and pleasure.
   "It's the priests who've done it," the old man said.
   "The priests?"
   "The priests."
   "Why the priests?"
   "The priests."
   A low voice near his knees said: "The old man's crazy. What's the use of asking him questions?"
   "Is that you, Catarina?" He added: "I don't really believe it, you know. It's just a question."
   "Now I've got something to complain about," the voice went on. "A mans got to defend his honour. You'll admit that, won't you?"
   "I don't know anything about honour."
   "I was in the cantina and the man I'm telling you about came up to me and said: 'Your mother's a whore.' Well, I couldn't do anything about it: he'd got his gun on him. All I could do was wait. He drank too much beer—I knew he would—and when he was staggering I followed him out. I had a bottle and I smashed it against a wall. You see, I hadn't got my gun. His family's got influence with the jefe or I'd never be here."
   "It's a terrible thing to kill a man."
   "You talk like a priest."
   "It was the priests who did it," the old man said. "You're right, there."
   "What does he mean?"
   "What does it matter what an old man like that means? I'd like to tell you about something else. …"
   A woman's voice said: "They took the child away from him."
   [117] "Why?"
   "It was a bastard. They acted quite correctly."
   At the word bastard his heart moved painfully: it was as when a man in love hears a stranger name a flower which is also the name of a woman. Bastard: the word filled him with miserable happiness. It brought his own child nearer: he could see her under the tree by the rubbish-dump, unguarded. He repeated "Bastard?" as he might have repeated her name—with tenderness disguised as indifference.
   "They said he was no fit father. But, of course, when the priests fled, she had to go to him. Where else could she go?" It was like a happy ending until she said: "Of course she hated him. They'd taught her about things." He could imagine the small set mouth of an educated woman. What was she doing here?
   "Why is he in prison?"
   "He had a crucifix."
   The stench from the pail got worse all the time: the night stood round them like a wall, without ventilation, and he could hear somebody making water, drumming on the tin sides. He said: "They had no business ..."
   "They were doing what was right, of course. It was a mortal sin."
   "No right to make her hate him."
   "They know what's right."
   He said: "They were bad priests to do a thing like that. The sin was over. It was their duty to teach—well, love."
   "You don't know what's right. The priests know."
   He said after a moment's hesitation, very distinctly: "I am a priest."
   It was like the end: there was no need to hope any longer. The ten years' hunt was over at last. There was silence all round him. This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love: it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.
   "A priest?" the woman said at last.
   "Yes."
   "Do they know?"
   "Not yet."
   [118] He could feel a hand fumbling at his sleeve. A voice said: "You shouldn't have told us. Father, there are all sorts here. Murderers ..."
   The voice which had described the crime to him said: "You've no cause to abuse me. Because I kill a man it doesn't mean ..." Whispering started everywhere. The voice said bitterly: "I'm not an informer just because when a man says: 'Your mother's a whore ...' "
   The priest said: "There's no need for anyone to inform on me. That would be a sin. When it's daylight they'll discover for themselves."
   "They'll shoot you, father," the woman's voice said.
   "Yes."
   "Are you afraid?"
   "Yes. Of course."
   A new voice spoke, in the corner from which the sounds of pleasure had come. It said roughly and obstinately: "A man isn't afraid of a thing like that."
   "No?" the priest said.
   "A bit of pain. What do you expect? It has to come."
   "All the same," the priest said, "I am afraid."
   "Toothache is worse."
   "We can't all be brave men."
   The voice said with contempt: "You believers are all the same. Christianity makes you cowards."
   "Yes. Perhaps you are right. You see I am a bad priest and a bad man. To die in a state of mortal sin"—he gave an uneasy chuckle—"it makes you think."
   "There. It's as I say. Believing in God makes cowards." The voice was triumphant, as if it had proved something.
   "So then?" the priest said.
   "Better not to believe—and be a brave man."
   "I see—yes. And, of course, if one believed the Governor did not exist or the jefe, if we could pretend that this prison was not a prison at all but a garden, how brave we could be then."
   "That's just foolishness."
   "But when we found that the prison was a prison, and the Governor up there in the square undoubtedly existed, well, it wouldn't much matter if we'd been brave for an hour or two."
   [119] "Nobody could say that this prison was not a prison."
   "No? You don't think so? I can see you don't listen to the politicians." His feet were giving him great pain: he had cramp in the soles, but he could bring no pressure on the muscles to relieve them. It was not yet midnight: the hours of darkness stretched ahead interminably.
   The woman said suddenly: "Think. We have a martyr here ..."
   The priest giggled: he couldn't stop himself. He said: "I don't think martyrs are like this." He became suddenly serious, remembering Maria's words—it wouldn't be a good thing to bring mockery on the Church. He said: "Martyrs are holy men. It is wrong to think that just because one dies ... no. I tell you I am in a state of mortal sin. I have done things I couldn't talk to you about: I could only whisper them in the confessional." Everybody, when he spoke, listened attentively to him as if he were addressing them in church: he wondered where the inevitable Judas was sitting now, but he wasn't aware of Judas as he had been in the forest hut. He was moved by an enormous and irrational affection for the inhabitants of this prison. A phrase came to him: "God so loved the world ... " He said: "My children, you must never think the holy martyrs are like me. You have a name for me. Oh, I've heard you use it before now. I am a whisky priest. I am in here now because they found a bottle of brandy in my pocket." He tried to move his feet from under him: the cramp had passed: now they were lifeless: all feeling gone. Oh, well, let them stay. He wouldn't have to use them often again.
   The old man was muttering, and the priest's thoughts went back to Brigida. The knowledge of the world lay in her like the dark explicable spot in an X-ray photograph: he longed—with a breathless feeling in the breast—to save her, but he knew the surgeon's decision—the ill was incurable.
   The woman's voice said pleadingly: "A little drink, father ... it's not so important." He wondered why she was here—probably for having a holy picture in her house. She had the tiresome intent note of a pious woman. They were extraordinarily foolish over pictures. Why not burn them? One didn't need a picture. … He said sternly: "Oh, I am not only a drunkard." He had always been worried by the fate of pious [120] women: as much as politicians, they fed on illusion: he was frightened for them. They came to death so often in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity. It was one's duty, if one could, to rob them of their sentimental notions of what was good ... He said in hard accents: "I have a child."
   What a worthy woman she was! her voice pleaded in the darkness: he couldn't catch what she said, but it was something about the Good Thief. He said: "My child, the thief repented. I haven't repented." He remembered her coming into the hut, the dark malicious knowing look with the sunlight at her back. He said: "I don't know how to repent." That was true: he had lost the faculty. He couldn't say to himself that he wished his sin had never existed, because the sin seemed to him now so unimportant— and he loved the fruit of it. He needed a confessor to draw his mind slowly down the drab passages which led to horror, grief, and repentance.
   The woman was silent now: he wondered whether after all he had been too harsh with her. If it helped her faith to believe that he was a martyr ... but he rejected the idea: one was pledged to truth. He shifted an inch or two on his hams and said: "What time does it get light?"
   "Four ... five ..." a man replied. "How can we tell, father? We haven't clocks."
   "Have you been here long?"
   "Three weeks."
   "Are you kept here all day?"
   "Oh, no. They let us out to clean the yard."
   He thought: That is when I shall be discovered—unless it's earlier: for surely one of these people will betray me first. A long train of thought began, which led him to announce after a while: "They are offering a reward for me. Five hundred, six hundred pesos, I'm not sure." Then he was silent again. He couldn't urge any man to inform against him—that would be tempting him to sin—but at the same time if there was an informer here, there was no reason why the wretched creature should be bilked of his reward. To commit so ugly a sin—it must count as murder—and to have no compensation in this world ... He thought simply: it wouldn't be fair.
   "Nobody here," a voice said, "wants their blood money." Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was [121] just one criminal among a herd of criminals ... he had a sense of companionship which he had never received in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.
   The pious woman's voice leapt hysterically out at him: "It is so stupid to tell them that. You don't know the sort of wretches who are here, father. Thieves, murderers …"
   "Well," an angry voice said, "why are you here?"
   "I had good books in my house," she announced, with unbearable pride. He had done nothing to shake her complacency. He said: "They are everywhere. It's no different here."
   "Good books?"
   He giggled. "No, no. Thieves, murderers ... Oh, well, my child, if you had more experience you would know there are worse things to be." The old man seemed to be uneasily asleep: his head lay sideways against the priest's shoulder, and he muttered angrily. God knows, it had never been easy to move in this place, but the difficulty seemed to increase as the night wore on and limbs stiffened. He couldn't twitch his shoulder now without waking the old man to another night of suffering. Well, he thought, it was my kind who robbed him: it's only fair to be made a little uncomfortable. … He sat silent and rigid against the damp wall, with his dead feet like leprosy under his haunches. The mosquitoes droned on: it was no good defending yourself by striking at the air: they pervaded the whole place like an element. Somebody as well as the old man had somewhere fallen asleep and was snoring, a curious note of satisfaction, as though he had eaten and drunk well at a good dinner and was now taking a snooze. … The priest tried to calculate the hour: how much time had passed since he had met the beggar in the plaza? It was probably not long after midnight: there would be hours more of this.
   It was, of course, the end, but at the same time you had to be prepared for everything, even escape. If God intended him to escape he could snatch him away from in front of a firing squad. But God was merciful: there was only one reason, surely, which would make Him refuse His peace—if there was any peace—that he could still be of use in saving a soul, his own or another's. But what good could he do now? They had him on the run: he dared not enter a village in case somebody else should pay with his life: perhaps a man who was in mortal [122] sin and unrepentant: it was impossible to say what souls might not be lost simply because he was obstinate and proud and wouldn't admit defeat. He couldn't even say Mass any longer —he had no wine. It had all gone down the dry gullet of the Chief of Police. It was—appallingly—complicated. He was still afraid of death; he would be more afraid of death yet when the morning came, but it was beginning to attract him by its simplicity.
   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 capital: 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 all: 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.
   A voice in the yard called: "Montez:" He sat on upon his dead feet; he thought automatically: "This suit isn't good for much more": it was smeared and fouled by the cell floor and his fellow prisoners: he had obtained it at great risk in a store down by the river, pretending to be a small farmer with ideas above his station. Then he remembered he wouldn't need it much longer—it came with an odd shock, like locking the door of one's house for the last time. The voice repeated impatiently: "Montez."
   He remembered that that, for the moment, was his name. He looked up from his ruined suit and saw the sergeant unlocking the cell door. "Here, Montez." He let the old man's head fall gently back against the sweating wall and tried to stand up, but his feet crumpled like pastry. "Do you want to sleep all day?" the sergeant complained testily: something had irritated him: he wasn't as friendly as he had been the night before. He let out a kick at a sleeping man and beat on the cell door: "Come on. Wake up, all of you. Out into the yard." Only the Indian boy obeyed, sliding unobtrusively out, with his look of alien happiness. The sergeant complained: "The dirty hounds. Do they want us to wash them? You, Montez." Life began to return painfully to his feet. He managed to reach the door.
   The yard had come sluggishly to life. A queue of men were bathing their faces at a single tap; a man in a vest and pants sat on the ground hugging a rifle. "Get out into the yard and wash," the sergeant yelled at them, but when the priest stepped out he snapped at him: "Not you, Montez."
   "Not me."
   "We've got other plans for you," the sergeant said.
   The priest stood waiting while his fellow prisoners filed out into the yard. One by one they went past him: he looked at their feet and not their faces, standing like a temptation at the door. Nobody said a word: a woman's feet went draggingly by in black worn low-heeled shoes. He whispered without looking up: "Pray for me."
   [127] "What's that you said, Montez?"
   He couldn't think of a lie: he felt as if ten years had exhausted his whole stock of deceit.
   "What's that you said?"
   The shoes had stopped moving. The woman's voice said: "He was begging." She added mercilessly: "He ought to have more sense. I've nothing for him." Then she went on, flatfooted, into the yard.
   "Did you sleep well, Montez?" the sergeant badgered him.
   "Not very well."
   "What do you expect?" the sergeant said. "It'll teach you to like brandy too well, won't it?"
   "Yes." He wondered how much longer all these preliminaries would take.
   "Well, if you spend all your money on brandy, you've got to do a bit of work in return for a night's lodging. Fetch the pails out of the cells and mind you don't spill them—this place stinks enough as it is."
   "Where do I take them to?"
   The sergeant pointed to the door of the excusado beyond the tap. "Report to me when you've finished that," he said, and went bellowing orders back into the yard.
   The priest bent down and took the pail: it was full and very heavy: he went bowed with the weight across the yard: sweat got into his eyes. He wiped them free and saw one behind another in the washing queue faces he knew—the hostages. There was Miguel, whom he had seen taken away: he remembered the mother screaming out and the lieutenant's tired anger and the sun coming up. They saw him at the same time: he put down the heavy pail and looked at them. Not to recognize them would have been like a hint, a claim, a demand to them to go on suffering and let him escape. Miguel had been beaten up: there was a sore under his eye—flies buzzed round it as they buzz round a mule's raw flank. Then the queue moved on: they looked at the ground and passed him: strangers took their place. He prayed silently: O God, send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for. It seemed to him a damnable mockery that they should sacrifice themselves for a whisky priest with a bastard child. The soldier sat in his pants with his gun [128] between his knees paring his nails and biting off the loose skin. In an odd way he felt abandoned because they had shown no sign of recognition.
   The excusado was a cesspool with two planks across it on which a man could stand. He emptied the pail and went back across the yard to the row of cells. There were six: one by one he took the pails: once he had to stop and retch: splash, splash, to and fro across the yard. He came to the last cell. It wasn't empty: a man lay back against the wall: the early sun just reached his feet. Flies buzzed around a mound of vomit on the floor. The eyes opened and watched the priest stooping over the pail: two fangs protruded. ...
   The priest moved quickly and splashed the floor. The half-caste said in that too—familiar nagging tone: "Wait a moment. You cant do that in here." He explained proudly: "I'm not a prisoner. I'm a guest." The priest made a motion of apology (he was afraid to speak) and moved again. "Wait a moment," the half-caste commanded him again. "Come here."
   The priest stood stubbornly, half-turned away, near the door. "Come here," the half-caste said. "You're a prisoner, aren't you?—and I'm a guest—of the Governor. Do you want me to shout for a policeman? Then do as you're told: come here." It seemed as if God were deciding ... finally. He came, pail in hand, and stood beside the large flat naked foot, and the half-caste looked up at him from the shadow of the wall, asking him sharply and anxiously: "What are you doing here?"
   "Cleaning up."
   "You know what I mean."
   "I was caught with a bottle of brandy," the priest said, trying to roughen his voice.
   "I know you," the half-caste said, "I couldn't believe my eyes, but when you speak ..."
   "I don't think …"
   "That priest's voice," the half-caste said with disgust. He was like a dog of a different breed: he couldn't help his hackles' rising. The big toe moved plumply and inimically. The priest put down the pail. He argued hopelessly: "You're drunk."
   "Beer, beer," the half-caste said, "nothing but beer. They [129] promised me the best of everything, but you can't trust them. Don't I know the jefe's got his own brandy locked away?"
   "I must empty the pail."
   "If you move, I'll shout. I've got so many things to think about," the half-caste complained bitterly. The priest waited: there was nothing else to do: he was at the man's mercy—a silly phrase, for those malarial eyes had never known what mercy is. He was saved at any rate from the indignity of pleading.
   "You see," the mestizo carefully explained, "I'm comfortable here." His yellow toes curled luxuriously beside the vomit. "Good food, beer, company, and this roof doesn't leak. You don't have to tell me what'll happen after—they'll kick me out like a dog, like a dog." He became shrill and indignant. "What have they got you here for? That's what I want to know. It looks crooked to me. It's my job, isn't it, to find you? Who's going to have the reward if they've got you already? The jefe, I shouldn't wonder, or that bastard sergeant." He brooded unhappily: "You can't trust a soul these days."
   "And there's a Red Shirt," the priest said.
   "A Red Shirt?"
   "He really caught me."
   "Mother of God," the mestizo said, "and they'll all have the ear of the Governor." He looked beseechingly up. He said: "You're an educated man. Advise me."
   The priest said: "It would be murder, a mortal sin."
   "I don't mean that. I mean about the reward. You see, as long as they don't know, well, I'm comfortable here. A man deserves a few weeks' holiday. And you can't escape far, can you? It would be better, wouldn't it, to catch you out of here? In the town somewhere? I mean nobody else could claim ..." He said furiously: "A poor man has so much to think about."
   "I dare say," the priest said, "they'd give you something even here."
   "Something," the mestizo said, levering himself up against the wall; "why shouldn't I have it all?"
   "What's going on in here?" the sergeant said. He stood in the doorway, in the sunlight, looking in.
   [130] The priest said slowly: "He wanted me to clean up his vomit. I said you hadn't told me ..."
   "Oh, he's a guest," the sergeant said. "He's got to be treated right. You do as he says."
   The mestizo smirked. He said: "And another bottle of beer, sergeant?"
   Not yet," the sergeant said. "You've got to look round the town first."
   The priest picked up the pail and went back across the yard, leaving them arguing. He felt as if a gun were levelled at his back: he went into the excusado and emptied the pail: then came out again into the sun—the gun was levelled at his breast. The two men stood in the cell door talking. He walked across the yard: they watched him come. The sergeant said to the mestizo: "You say you're bilious and can't see properly this morning. You clean up your own vomit then. If you don't do your job ..." Behind the sergeant's back the mestizo gave him a cunning and unreassuring wink. Now that the immediate fear was over, he felt only regret. God had decided. He had to go on with life, go on making decisions, acting on his own advice, making plans. …
   It took him another half-hour to finish cleaning the cells, throwing a bucket of water over each floor; he watched the pious woman disappear—as if for ever—through the archway to where her sister waited with the fine: they were both tied up in black shawls like something bought in the market, something hard and dry and second-hand. Then he reported again to the sergeant, who inspected the cells and criticized his work and ordered him to throw more water down, and then suddenly got tired of the whole business and told him he could go to the jefe for permission to leave. So he waited another hour on the bench outside the jefe's door, watching the sentry move lackadaisically to and fro in the hot sun.
   And when at last a policeman led him in, it wasn't the jefe who sat at the desk, but the lieutenant. The priest stood not far from his own portrait on the wall and waited. Once he glanced quickly and nervously up at the old scrumpled newspaper cutting and thought with relief: It's not very like me now. What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days—and yet in those days he had been comparatively [131] innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone: now in his corruption he had learnt ...
   "Well," the lieutenant said, "has he cleaned up the cells?" He didn't take his eyes from his papers. He said: "Tell the sergeant I want two dozen men with properly cleaned rifles—within two minutes." He looked abstractedly up at the priest and said: "Well, what are you waiting for?"
   "For permission, Excellency, to go away."
   "I am not an excellency. Learn to call things by their right names." He said sharply: "Have you been here before?"
   "Never."
   "Your name is Montez. I seem to come across too many people of that name in these days. Relations of yours?" He sat watching him closely, as if memory were beginning to work.
   The priest said hurriedly: "My cousin was shot at Concepcion."
   "That was not my fault."
   "I only meant—we were much alike. Our fathers were twins. Not half an hour between them. I thought your Excellency seemed to think ..."
   "As I remember him, he was quite different. A tall thin man ... narrow shoulders ..."
   The priest said hurriedly: "Perhaps only to the family eye …"
   "But then I only saw him once." It was almost as if the lieutenant had something on his conscience, as he sat with his dark Indian-blooded hands restless on the pages, brooding. ... He said: "Where are you going?"
   "God knows."
   "You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth—that God knows nothing." Some tiny scrap of life like a grain of smut went racing across the page in front of him: he pressed his finger down on it and said: "You had no money for your fine?" and watched another smut edge out between the leaves, scurrying for refuge: in this heat there was no end to life.
   "No."
   "How will you live?"
   [132] "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."