Chapter 4: - Page 3 of 5

Here he hesitated for a while.  Some months after your departure the troubles with Padre Damaso began, but I am unable to explain the real cause of them.  Fray Damaso accused him of not coming to confession, although he had not done so formerly and they had nevertheless been good friends, as you may still remember.  Moreover, Don Rafael was a very upright man, more so than many of those who regularly attend confession and than the confessors themselves.  He had framed for himself a rigid morality and often said to me, when he talked of these troubles, ‘Señor Guevara, do you believe that God will pardon any crime, a murder for instance, solely by a man’s telling it to a priest—a man after all and one whose duty it is to keep quiet about it—by his fearing that he will roast in hell as a penance—by being cowardly and certainly shameless into the bargain? I have another conception of God,’ he used to say, ‘for in my opinion one evil does not correct another, nor is a crime to be expiated by vain lamentings or by giving alms to the Church.  Take this example: if I have killed the father of a family, if I have made of a woman a sorrowing widow and destitute orphans of some happy children, have I satisfied eternal Justice by letting myself be hanged, or by entrusting my secret to one who is obliged to guard it for me, or by giving alms to priests who are least in need of them, or by buying indulgences and lamenting night and day? What of the widow and the orphans? My conscience tells me that I should try to take the place of him whom I killed, that I should dedicate my whole life to the welfare of the family whose misfortunes I caused.  But even so, who can replace the love of a husband and a father?’ Thus your father reasoned and by this strict standard of conduct regulated all his actions, so that it can be said that he never injured anybody.  On the contrary, he endeavored by his good deeds to wipe out some injustices which he said your ancestors had committed.  But to get back to his troubles with the curate—these took on a serious aspect.  Padre Damaso denounced him from the pulpit, and that he did not expressly name him was a miracle, since anything might have been expected of such a character.  I foresaw that sooner or later the affair would have serious results.

Again the old lieutenant paused.  There happened to be wandering about the province an ex-artilleryman who has been discharged from the army on account of his stupidity and ignorance.  As the man had to live and he was not permitted to engage in manual labor, which would injure our prestige, he somehow or other obtained a position as collector of the tax on vehicles.  The poor devil had no education at all, a fact of which the natives soon became aware, as it was a marvel for them to see a Spaniard who didn’t know how to read and write.  Every one ridiculed him and the payment of the tax was the occasion of broad smiles.  He knew that he was an object of ridicule and this tended to sour his disposition even more, rough and bad as it had formerly been.  They would purposely hand him the papers upside down to see his efforts to read them, and wherever he found a blank space he would scribble a lot of pothooks which rather fitly passed for his signature.  The natives mocked while they paid him.  He swallowed his pride and made the collections, but was in such a state of mind that he had no respect for any one.  He even came to have some hard words with your father.