Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene Page A

of incantations addressed to her in all tongues by the light of candles before the plaster image.
    They had drunk enough by the roadside and neither was in the mood to seek a restaurant. It was as though two dead women had been travelling with them during those last kilometres. Father Quixote was glad to have a room to himself, minute though it was. It seemed to him that his journey had already extended across the whole breadth of Spain, though he knew he was not much more than two hundred kilometres from La Mancha. The slowness of Rocinante made a nonsense of distance. Well, the furthest that his ancestor had gone from La Mancha in all his journeys had been the city of Barcelona and yet anyone who had read the true history would have thought that Don Quixote had covered the whole immense area of Spain. There was a virtue in slowness which we had lost. Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
    Before he went to sleep Father Quixote read a little because he was still haunted by his dream. He opened as was his custom St Francis de Sales at random. Even before the birth of Christ men had taken the sortes Virgilianae as a kind of horoscope and he had more faith in St Francis than in Virgil – that rather derivative poet. What he found in The Love of God astonished him a little, but all the same it encouraged him. ‘Among the reflections and resolutions it is good to make use of colloquies, and speak sometimes to our Lord, sometimes to the Angels, to the Saints and to oneself, to one’s own heart, to sinners, and even to inanimate creatures . . .’ He said to Rocinante, ‘Forgive me. I have driven you too hard,’ and fell into a dreamless sleep.

VI
    HOW MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE AND
    SANCHO VISIT ANOTHER HOLY SITE
    â€˜I am glad,’ the Mayor said as they took the road to Salamanca, ‘that you have at last consented to put on that bib – what do you call it?’
    â€˜A pechera .’
    â€˜I was afraid that we might find ourselves in prison if those Guardia checked too quickly in Avila.’
    â€˜Why? For what?’
    â€˜The reason is unimportant, it’s only the fact which counts. I had some experience of prison during the Civil War. There was always a certain tension in prison, you know. One’s friends went away and never came back.’
    â€˜But now – there’s no war now. Things are better.’
    â€˜Yes. Perhaps. Of course in Spain one has always found that the best people have been for a while in prison. It’s possible that we would never have heard of your great ancestor if Cervantes had not served his time that way more than once. The prison gives you even more chance to think than a monastery where the poor devils have to wake up at all sorts of ungodly hours to pray. In prison I was never woken up before six o’clock and at night the lights went out usually at nine. Of course interrogations were apt to be painful, but they took place at a reasonable hour. Never during the siesta. The great thing to remember, monsignor, is that unlike an abbot an interrogator wants to sleep at his usual hour.’
    In Arévalo there were some old torn posters of a travelling circus on the walls. A man in tights displayed arms and thighs of an exorbitant size. El Tigre he was called – ‘The Great Wrestler of the Pyrenees’.
    â€˜How little Spain changes,’ the Mayor said. ‘You would never feel in France that you were in the world of Racine or Molière, nor in London that you were still close to Shakespeare’s time. It is only in Spain and Russia that time stands still. We shall have our adventures on the road, father, much as your ancestor did. We have already battled with the windmills and we have only missed by a week or two an adventure with the Tiger. He would probably have proved as tame when challenged as your ancestor found the lion.’
    â€˜But I am not Don