Mask of the Andes. Jon Cleary
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were now occupied by old men dressed in old-fashioned dark suits, their wary faces hidden in the shade of broad-brimmed felt hats; they looked like retired gangsters from movies of the thirties, men who had stepped out of frame but not out of costume. But McKenna knew that they were not as interesting as old-time gangsters. They were just middle-class criollos living on dreams that were as dim as their eyesight, selling off their possessions piece by piece, hoping that at the end they would have enough left to pay for a funeral befitting their blood. A flock of young children, criollos and mestizos, wafted up the broad steps of the cathedral, two nuns fluttering behind them like Black Orpington hens. An army truck went round the plaza and pulled up outside the prison on the other side of the square. Half a dozen prisoners, all Indians, chained together, got down from the back of the truck and were pushed through the small door in the tall wooden gates. The truck drove off and that side of the square was once more quiet and deserted. No one in the square had done more than glance casually across at the prisoners. Too much interest, McKenna knew, might have brought an inquiry from the security police on the third floor of the government palace on the northern side of the plaza. He looked across and saw the man at the third floor window: the sun flashed on his binoculars as he turned them from the prison gates on to McKenna himself as the latter got out of the Jeep outside the Bishop’s palace. For one mad moment the priest wanted to turn and jerk his thumb at the watcher, but reason prevailed. You did not make rude gestures in front of the Bishop’s palace, certainly not at the security police.
As McKenna crossed the tessellated pavement a small boy flung himself at his feet; but he was not a juvenile sinner seeking absolution, just a bootblack claiming the Americano padre could not visit the Bishop with dirty shoes. McKenna submitted to the blackmail, gave the boy a lavish tip, then went into the palace spotless at least up to the ankles. Behind him the bootblack, clutching half a day’s income in his hand, told him he was a saint.
If it were only so easy, McKenna told himself.
Bishop Ruiz was in his study reading The Wall Street Journal; he nodded at it as he put it down. ‘There are so many Bibles to get through these days. Do you read it, Padre McKenna?’
‘No, your grace. I am stupid when it comes to understanding high finance.’
‘Your father never taught you anything about it? He was a rich man.’
‘My father used to say that a fool and his father’s money are soon parted, so he never gave me any. Not till he died.’
‘I knew him when he owned the San Cristobal mine. I was a young priest then – I baptized you, did you know that?’
‘No,’ said McKenna, and wondered if he was expected to feel honoured. He also wondered how much the Bishop, a wealthy man even as a priest, had charged for the service.
‘I used to go out and say Mass for the miners. Your father would count the heads at Mass and then give me an American dollar for each one – he always seemed to have a bank of dollars. He would joke that he was buying his way into Heaven on the bended knees of the Indians.’
‘What did the Indians think of him?’ McKenna had never known the Bishop to talk of his father before and he wondered if this was the reason he had been brought here. The Bishop had chosen to speak in Spanish and that meant this was more than just a social call. McKenna was puzzled, seeking a connection between himself and his father that would concern the Bishop, but he could think of none. Even the older Indians up on the altiplano, ones such as Jesu Mamani, had never asked McKenna about his father.
Bishop Ruiz hesitated, then said, ‘I do not know, to be truthful. I have never known the miners to love any of the mine owners.’
They didn’t love my father, McKenna thought. You know the truth about him but you can’t condemn him because that would mean condemning your own kind.
‘When your father sold out to that other company, they worked the mine out in five years, drove the miners like dogs, then closed it down and went home. They left a caretaker-manager and his wife there, Americans. When the revolution came in 1952, the miners went back there and killed them – horribly. I saw the bodies—’ He shook his head, worked his mouth at an old vile taste, shuddered because he knew the future might one day taste the same. ‘The miners all went to communion the next morning and the priest up in Altea, poor Padre Luis, was too frightened to turn them away from the altar rail. He was afraid they would have killed him, too, if he had refused them.’ He looked across his wide, leather-topped desk at McKenna. ‘Those are the sort of people you are dealing with, my son.’
Now he’s getting to the reason for my being here, McKenna thought. But he was still puzzled: ‘I don’t think they connect me with the mine. What that other company did, I mean. As for what my father did—’ He tailed off, not wanting to condemn his father to this man who would give absolution too easily, because his own money came from the same sort of exploitation.
‘I did not say they did,’ said Bishop Ruiz patiently. In the cathedral next door the bells tolled for the midday Angelus. One of the bells was cracked and it sounded what could have been a blasphemous note; but the bells had been rung for four hundred years and tradition won out over music. The Bishop listened to it, flinching a little, then put it out of his mind; he would leave the question of a new bell to his successor, just as his predecessor had left it to him. He looked across at the young priest who was a more immediate problem. ‘Padre McKenna, did you read the Pope’s encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae?’
‘Of course,’ said McKenna, and knew now why he had been sent for.
‘It has come to our ears—’ Bishop Ruiz sat up straight. That’s it, thought McKenna, never lounge when using the royal or episcopal plural; the day, only half over, had been full of shock and now he was beginning to feel hysterically facetious. ‘It has come to our ears that you have been giving the Pill to some of the women up in Altea.’
‘Where did you hear that, your grace?’
‘We have our sources,’ said the Bishop; and McKenna had a vision of the fat little priest Padre Luis sitting exactly where he himself was sitting now. Padre Luis didn’t have the courage to condemn murder but he could condemn a priest who went against the Holy Father’s orders. ‘We are assured they are reliable. Are the reports true?’
McKenna sighed inwardly, then nodded. ‘Yes, your grace.’
‘Does the Superior of your order condone this?’
‘He doesn’t know. I bought the supply of the Pill out of my own funds, had them mailed down to me from the States.’
‘Addressed to you as a priest?’ The Bishop’s voice, which had become formal once he had got down to business, suddenly broke. The bells next door abruptly subsided, the cracked bell clanging out the last note sardonically.
‘No. They were addressed to Senor T. J. McKenna, care of general delivery at the post office here in San Sebastian. I did my best to be discreet, your grace.’
Bishop Ruiz had a sense of humour; he permitted himself a smile at the young rebel. ‘That seems to be where your discretion stopped, at the post office. Padre, do you realize the magnitude of what you have done? It is one thing to sit in the confessional and condone what married couples tell you they have done. But you have—’ He threw up his elegant hands. ‘You are doing far worse than question the Holy Father’s dictum, you are actually sinning against it actively. As much – as much as if you were bedding with these women yourself!’
McKenna had expected a more sophisticated reprimand than that. ‘The thought couldn’t have been farther from my mind. I mean about going to bed with these women.’
‘Don’t joke,’ said the Bishop sharply, realizing he was not dealing with a stupid village priest like Padre Luis. I keep forgetting, he thought, this young man comes from the same class as myself. Well, almost: the blood may be coarser, but he has as much education and money.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound facetious—’
‘Did