The priest visited the old man no more, the story stood unfinished. The old man of course in no wise ceased to pace and rail. He at least had no plans for forgetting the injustices of his past life. The ten thousand insults. The catalog of woes. He had the mind of the injured party, you see. Nothing was lost to him. Of the priest what can be said? As with all priests his mind had become clouded by the illusion of its proximity to God. What priest will denounce his robes even to save himself? And yet the old man was not so far from his thoughts and one day they sent for him and they told him that the old man had fallen ill. That he lay on his pallet and spoke to no one. Not even God. The priest went to see him and it was as they said. He stood without the transept and addressed the old man. He asked if he were indeed ill. The old man lay staring at the fading frescoes. At the coming and going of the golondrinas. He cast his eyes upon the priest and his look was haggard and hollow and he looked away again. The priest seeing opportunity in the weakness of others in the normal human way took up where he’d left off those weeks before and began to declaim to the old man concerning the goodness of God. The old man clapped his hands to his ears but the priest only drew nearer. At last the old man staggered up from his pallet and began to scrabble up stones from the rubble and to pelt the priest with them and so drove him away.
He returned in three days’ time and spoke again to the old man but the old man no longer heard him. The food, the pitcher of milk‑which the people of Caborca had become accustomed to leave for him at the edge of the shadowline‑these remained untouched. God had outwitted him, of course. How could there have been another possibility? In the end it seemed He’d turned even the old man’s heretical usurpations to his own service. The sense of election which had at once sustained and tormented the pensioner these years now stood fulfilled in a way he’d not foreseen and before his troubled gaze stood the truth in its awful purity. He saw that he was indeed elect and that the God of the universe was yet more terrible than men reckoned. He could not be eluded nor yet set aside nor circumscribed about and it was true that He did indeed contain all else within Him even to the reasoning of the heretic else He were no God at all.
The priest was greatly moved by what he saw and this surprised him. In the end he even overcame his fears and ventured in beneath the dome of the ruinous church to the old man’s side. Perhaps this gave the old man heart. Perhaps even at this late juncture he thought the priest might bring the structure toppling down where he himself had failed. But the dome of course only hung in the air and after a while the old man began to speak. He took the priest’s hand as of the hand of a comrade and he spoke of his life and what it had been and what it had become. He told the priest what he had learned. In the end he said that no man can see his life until his life is done and where then to make a mending? It is God’s grace alone that we are bound by this thread of life. He held the priest’s hand in his own and he bade the priest look at their joined hands and he said see the likeness. This flesh is but a memento, yet it tells the true. Ultimately every man’s path is every other’s. There are no separate journeys for there are no separate men to make them. All men are one and there is no other tale to tell. But the priest only took his telling for confession and when the old man was done he began the words of absolution. At this the old man seized his arm midway in its crossing there in the still air by his deathbedside and stayed him with his eyes. He let go the priest’s other hand and raised his own. Like a man going on a journey. Save yourself, he hissed. Save yourself. Then he died.
Outside in the weedgrown streets all was silence. The man passed his cupped hand over the cat’s head, sleeking back its ears. The good, the damaged. The cat lay with its forepaws curled against its chest, its eyes half closed. This is my warrior cat, the man said. Pero es el más dulce de todo. Y el más simpático.
He looked up. He smiled. The storyteller’s task is not so simple. You will have guessed by now of course who was the priest. Or perhaps not so much priest as advocate of priestly things. Priestly views. This priest for a while yet would strive to cling to his calling but in the end he was no longer able to bear the look in the eyes of those who came to him for counsel. What counsel had he to give, this man of words? He’d no answers to the questions the old messenger had brought from the capital. The more he considered them the more knotted they became. The more he attempted even to formulate them the more they eluded his every representation and finally he came to see that they were not the old pensioner’s queries at all but his own.