Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online Page B

home.’
    â€˜And squanders his inheritance in riotous living,’ Father Quixote interrupted.
    â€˜Ah, that is the official version. My version is that he was so disgusted by the bourgeois world in which he had been brought up that he got rid of his wealth in the quickest way possible – perhaps he even gave it away and in a Tolstoyian gesture he became a peasant.’
    â€˜But he came home.’
    â€˜Yes, his courage failed him. He felt very alone on that pig farm. There was no branch of the Party to which he could look for help. Das Kapital had not yet been written, so he was unable to situate himself in the class struggle. Is it any wonder that he wavered for a time, poor boy?’
    â€˜Only for a time? How do you make that out?’
    â€˜The story in your version is cut short rather abruptly, isn’t it? By the ecclesiastical censors undoubtedly, even perhaps by Matthew, the tax collector. Oh, he is welcomed home, that’s true enough, a fatted calf is served, he is probably happy for a few days, but then he feels again the same oppressive atmosphere of bourgeois materialism that drove him from home. His father tries to express his love, but the furniture is still hideous, false Louis Quinze or whatever was the equivalent in those days, the same pictures of good living are on the walls, he is shocked more than ever by the servility of the servants and the luxury of the food, and he begins to remember the companionship he found in the poverty of the pig farm.’
    â€˜I thought you said there was no Party branch and that he felt very alone.’
    â€˜Yes, I exaggerated. He did have one friend, and he remembered the words of this old bearded peasant who had helped him carry the swill to the pigs, he began to brood on them – the words, I mean, not the pigs – back in the luxurious bed in which his bones yearned for the hard earth of his hut on the farm. After all, three thousand camels might well be enough to revolt a sensitive man.’
    â€˜You have a wonderful imagination, Sancho, even when you are sober. What on earth did the old peasant say?’
    â€˜He told him that every state in which private ownership of the land and means of production exists, in which capital dominates, however democratic it may claim to be, is a capitalist state, a machine invented and used by the capitalists to keep the working class in subjection.’
    â€˜Your story begins to sound almost as dull as my breviary.’
    â€˜Dull? Do you call that dull? I’m quoting Lenin himself. Don’t you see that the first idea of the class struggle is being lodged by that old peasant (I see him with a beard and whiskers like Karl Marx’s) in the mind of the Prodigal Son?’
    â€˜And what does he do?’
    â€˜After a week of disillusion he leaves home at dawn (a red dawn) to find again the pig farm and the old bearded peasant, determined now to play his part in the proletarian struggle. The old bearded peasant sees him coming from a distance and, running up, he throws his arms around his neck and kisses him, and the Prodigal Son says, “Father, I have sinned, I am not worthy to be called your son.”’
    â€˜The ending sounds familiar,’ Father Quixote said. ‘And I’m glad you left in the pigs.’
    â€˜Talking of pigs, couldn’t you drive a little faster? I don’t think we are averaging more than thirty kilometres an hour.’
    â€˜That’s Rocinante’s favourite speed. She’s a very old car and I can’t make her strain – not at her age.’
    â€˜We are being passed by every car on the road.’
    â€˜What does it matter? Her ancestor never got up to thirty kilometres an hour.’
    â€˜And your ancestor never got further in his travels than Barcelona.’
    â€˜What of it? He remained almost in hailing distance of La Mancha, but his mind travelled very far. And so did Sancho’s.’
    â€˜I