The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene

Author:Graham Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Central America, Essays & Travelogues, Special Interest, Religious
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2018-07-10T05:00:00+00:00

TABASCAN SUNDAY

The anonymity of Sunday seems peculiarly unnatural in Mexico: a man going hunting in the marshes with his dog and his gun, a young people’s fiesta, shops closing after noon—nothing else to divide this day from all the other days, no bell to ring. I sat at the head of the stairs and had my shoes cleaned by a little blond bootblack—a thin tired child in tattered trousers like someone out of Dickens. Only his brown eyes were Mexican—not his transparent skin and his fine gold hair. I was afraid to ask his name, for it might have been Greene. I gave him twice what I usually gave (twenty centavos—say, five cents) and he returned me ten centavos’ change, going wearily down the stairs with his heavy box into the great heat of Sunday.

Garrido has fled to Costa Rica and yet nothing is done. “We die like dogs.” There were no secret Masses in private houses such as are found in the neighbouring state, only a dreadful lethargy as the Catholics died slowly out—without Confession, without the Sacraments, the child unbaptized, and the dying man unshriven. I thought of Rilke’s phrase: “An empty, horrible alley, an alley in a foreign town, in a town where nothing is forgiven.”

There are, I suppose, geographical and racial excuses for the lethargy. Tabasco is a state of river and swamp and extreme heat; in northern Chiapas there is no choice between a mule and the rare plane for a traveller, and in Tabasco no choice between plane and boat. But a mule is a sociable form of transport—nights spent with strangers huddling together in the cold mountain air, talk over the beans and the embers; while in a boat you are isolated with the mosquitoes between the banana plantations.

And then there are no Indians in Tabasco, with their wild beliefs and their enormous if perverted veneration, to shame the Catholic into some action. Too much foreign blood came into Tabasco when it was a prosperous country; the faith with the Grahams and Greenes goes back only a few generations. They haven’t the stability of the old Spanish families in Chiapas.

Nothing in a tropical town can fill the place of a church for the most mundane use; a church is the one spot of coolness out of the vertical sun, a place to sit, a place where the senses can rest a little while from ugliness; it offers to the poor man what a rich man may get in a theatre—though not in Tabasco. Now in Villahermosa, in the blinding heat and the mosquito-noisy air, there is no escape at all for anyone. Garrido did his job well: he knew that the stones cry out, and he didn’t leave any stones. There is a kind of cattle-tick you catch in Chiapas, which fastens its head in the flesh; you have to burn it out, otherwise the head remains embedded and festers. It is an ugly metaphor to use, but an exact one: in northern

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