Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online Page A

deny that he did many wrong things.’
    â€˜Ah, but there’s that convenient escape you’ve invented – Purgatory.’
    â€˜I’ve invented nothing – neither Hell nor Purgatory.’
    â€˜Forgive me, father. I meant of course your Church.’
    â€˜The Church depends on written authority as your Party depends on Marx and Lenin.’
    â€˜But you believe your books are the word of God.’
    â€˜Be fair, Sancho. Do you not think – except sometimes at night when you can’t sleep – that Marx and Lenin are as infallible as – well, Matthew and Mark?’
    â€˜And when you can’t sleep, monsignor?’
    â€˜The idea of Hell has sometimes disturbed my sleeplessness. Perhaps that same night in your room you are thinking of Stalin and the camps. Was Stalin – or Lenin – necessarily right? Perhaps you are asking that question at the same moment when I am asking myself whether it is possible . . . how can a merciful and loving God . . .? Oh, I cling to my old books, but I have my doubts too. The other night – because of something Teresa said to me in the kitchen about the heat of her stove – I reread all the Gospels. Do you know that St Matthew mentions Hell fifteen times in fifty-two pages of my bible and St John not once? St Mark twice in thirty-one pages and St Luke three times in fifty-two. Well, of course, St Matthew was a tax collector, poor man, and he probably believed in the efficacy of punishment, but it made me wonder . . .’
    â€˜And how right you were.’
    â€˜I hope – friend – that you sometimes doubt too. It’s human to doubt.’
    â€˜I try not to doubt,’ the Mayor said.
    â€˜Oh, so do I. So do I. In that we are certainly alike.’
    The Mayor put his hand for a moment on Father Quixote’s shoulder, and Father Quixote could feel the electricity of affection in the touch. It’s odd, he thought, as he steered Rocinante with undue caution round a curve, how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith. The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference: the doubter fights only with himself.
    â€˜The thought of the sucking-pig at Botin’s,’ the Mayor said, ‘reminds me of that pretty fable of the Prodigal Son. Of course I realize the difference, for in that story I think it was a calf the father slaughtered – yes, a fatted calf. I hope our sucking-pig will be as well fattened.’
    â€˜A very beautiful parable,’ Father Quixote said with a note of defiance. He felt uneasy about what was to come.
    â€˜Yes, it begins beautifully,’ said the Mayor. ‘There is this very bourgeois household, a father and two sons. One might describe the father as a rich Russian kulak who regards his peasants as so many souls whom he owns.’
    â€˜There is nothing about kulaks or souls in the parable.’
    â€˜The story you have read has been probably a little corrected and slanted here and there by the ecclesiastical censors.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜It could have been told so differently and perhaps it was. Here is this young man who by some beneficent trick of heredity has grown up against all odds with a hatred of inherited wealth. Perhaps Christ had Job in mind. Christ was nearer in time to the author of Job than you are to your great ancestor, the Don. Job, you remember, was obscenely rich. He owned seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels. The son feels stifled by his bourgeois surroundings – perhaps even by the kind of furniture and the kind of pictures on the walls, of fat kulaks sitting down to their Sabbath meal, a sad contrast with the poverty he sees around him. He has to escape – anywhere. So he demands his share of the inheritance which will come to his brother and himself on their father’s death and he leaves