The Last Supper: And Other Stories Read online

  “Get rid of some of the Coca Cola bottles.”

  “What?”

  “Get rid of them, sir? I don’t understand you,” said the co-pilot.

  “Dump them,” I said emphatically. “Pitch them out of the open doors. And keep dumping them until we’re light enough to make altitude.”

  “The Coca Cola bottles, sir?”

  “Exactly—that’s just what I had in mind, the Coca Cola bottles.”

  “You don’t mean dump them? You don’t mean throw them away?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Oh, no sir,” said the pilot.

  “We couldn’t do that,” said the co-pilot.

  “Not with Coca Cola bottles,” the navigator said seriously. Anything else, yes. Jeeps, tanks, guns—oh, yes, certainly, if the situation warranted it. But not Coca Cola bottles. I’m afraid you don’t understand about Coca Cola, sir.”

  “You see, Coca Cola,” said the pilot, “well, I don’t really know how to explain. It takes years in the army to understand what I mean. I know you probably have had a great deal of experience, sir, but in the army it’s something else. You don’t just throw away Coca Cola bottles.”

  “Our manifest would be short,” the navigator said. “They would ask what happened to the bottles? We would say, we dumped them into the Arabian desert. Oh, no, no, sir. You don’t. You just don’t.”

  “I’ll take the responsibility myself,” I begged them. “Put it all on my shoulders. I’ll be responsible to the Coca Cola Company and the army. As a matter of fact, I’ll pay for the damn bottles.”

  “Oh, no sir—you just can’t take such a responsibility.”

  Plunging wildly, I said, “I outrank all of you. Here’s my company status. Suppose I order you to.”

  “Well, sir, I’m afraid not,” the pilot said sadly. “You don’t really outrank us as a correspondent. I’m afraid you have no right to order us to do so.”

  “But sooner or later, we’re going to hit one of those mountains of sand. Don’t you know what it means to come down in the Arabian desert? You know the Arabs don’t like Americans, and that’s if they find us and we don’t die of thirst, and if they find us, you know what kind of things they do.”

  “Yes, sir, it’s a pretty bad situation, isn’t it,” the pilot agreed. “It’s a shame we have to be in such a situation, but I really don’t know what to do about it. The only thing we could think of was to call ahead to the next airstrip and tell them we’re coming in to reload. That’s about eighty miles from here and no bad ridges in between. We have a very good chance of making it, sir.”

  I appealed to their pride and pointed out what an ignoble way to die this was, crushed like an insect between sand and Coca Cola bottles; I drew vivid pictures of Arab atrocities against Americans, embroidering them with full barracks detail; I spoke of the process of dehydration in that desert heat and of how it feels to die of thirst, or how I thought it would feel to die of thirst from the best accounts I had read.

  It was all to no avail, and they were” determined to bring in the plane with all bottles accounted for.

  The next twenty minutes were not very pleasant, and I suppose it was one of the better moments of my life when the airstrip appeared in the hazy distance. We were very low as we came in—our altitude possibly less than a thousand feet, and it all happened very quickly. Something was missing, something important and decisive in our momentary existence, and what was missing clawed at my nerves, my memory, my whole awareness; and then, as the cold sweat of fear broke out all over me, I realized that the missing factor was that loud, ear-splitting crash one hears when a C46 drops its landing gear. We were coming in without wheels.

  I broke into in wild sound, yelling “wheels, undercarriage—” and other associated words as fast and loud as I could, but it was too late. We were already at the landing strip and settling onto the concrete, and suddenly the fat belly of the plane hit the runway, and we made a beautiful landing, tearing out our belly and a good deal of the runway to a symphony of Coca Cola bottles. It was a very good landing; as I heard afterwards, we would hardly have done much better with wheels, except that the bottom part of the plane would have stayed with us, and you couldn’t blame the three young men who flew it for forgetting about their landing gear, considering what we had been through. As a matter of fact, no one was injured, and we picked our way through smashed crates and bottles out onto the lovely earth.

  I was still in Arabia, and I stood in the sun, watching the ambulance and jeeps converge upon us.

  “Well, here we are,” the navigator said.

  “Here we are,” the co-pilot said.

  “You know, sir,” the pilot said to me, cheerfully, “once you’re in, you can land just as well without the wheels as with them.”

  “It’s hard on the plane,” said the navigator.

  “They probably jammed up with the heat,” the co-pilot lied hopefully.

  “A shame about all those bottles, but here we are,” said the pilot. “Still, those bottles—we won’t hear the end of that.”

  “We’re in trouble—real trouble,” the navigator sighed. “If only we were carrying ammo instead!”

  Christ in Cuernavaca

  ON A COOL, CLEAR SUMMER MORNING, AS MY WIFE AND I were walking down Dwight D. Morrow Street in Cuernavaca, down from the hilltop toward the old Market, we saw a man riding on a little donkey—or burro, as they call them there—and he looked like Jesus Christ. You might remark that no one knows just what Christ looked like, but there is a face that has formed with time and taken shape in ten thousand paintings and sculptures, and this was the face of that man.

  He was Indian. He wore an old poncho and a flat-brimmed hat, and his long hair hung down under the hat on either side of his long and sensitive face. His face was filled with sorrow, as so many faces in Mexico are, and his dark, beautiful eyes reflected a burden as large as a heavy wooden cross. His saddle was a homemade, hand-carved and crude wooden affair, and the two small milk cans slung on either side of the pommel and the thong sandles on his feet showed that he was a peasant who had come into the city to sell the milk of his few goats. He rode slowly, and his thoughts as well as his sight must have been turned inward, for he seemed to see nothing at all but his own cares and memories.

  We stared at him directly and impolitely, for we could not help but stare at him, and after he had passed by, we looked at each other in wonder; for it is not a very usual experience for anyone to see the living image of Christ riding on a donkey.

  We talked about it as we did our shopping, and then we took our basket of food to the plaza, the village square, so that we might sit and drink a cup of the wonderful Mexican coffee and enjoy the morning sunlight before we walked home.

  When we reached the plaza, we saw sitting alone at a little table in front of the cafe, the man whom we always thought of as the exile, and because he was witty and charming and gentle, we were delighted to join him and have our coffee with him.

  Of course, there are many exiles of one sort and another in Cuernavaca, and there have been for years and years, the Spanish Republican exiles and before that the German exiles, and before that exiles from all over Latin America; for if one has to be an exile, where is there a town as beautiful, as gentle and mellow as Cuernavaca? But only in the past half decade have exiles from the United States of America appeared in Cuernavaca, exiles and refugees, political prisoners lately released and still sick with the loneliness and horror of jail, writers blacklisted and hounded wherever they were, actors who would act no more because once they had signed a petition, artists wanted by this Congressional Committee or that one, and other people who were sick with fear and horror at what was happening to the land in which they were born. At one time, not so long ago, there was a considerable colony of those exiles from the States, but that colony had dwindled, as one by one the refugees either moved to the urban satisfactions of Mexico City or gave way to homesickness and the pressures of poverty, and
returned to face whatever awaited them in their own land.

  Symbolically, only the exile remained that summer when we were there. For the moment, he was the last of the Americans in Cuernavaca. He was filled with sadness and grief because he had burned so many bridges between himself and his home and because the path was so tangled and impossible now, but he covered his grief and depression with wry humor and ironic commentary on himself. He knew that he evoked pity, but he resented such a role, and he greeted us impishly and caustically.

  After we had ordered coffee, my wife told him, “We saw Christ riding on a donkey to the market place.”

  “Ah?”

  I explained, sipping my coffee and looking out at the green and white sun-drenched square, the old Palace of Cortez, and the bowl of incredible mountains all around us.

  “I am not surprised,” he said. “In Mexico, anything can happen. Consider, four hundred years ago, this country was nailed to a cross by the Christian Spaniards. The national anthem became the song of the whip. Why does it surprise you to meet Christ on Dwight W. Morrow Street? This is a most likely place for him.”

  “You’re not impressed?”

  “Fewer and fewer things impress me. Being an exile breeds an inevitable cynicism. Anyway, I find this a curious reaction on the part of two people who consider themselves materialists.”

  “What we saw was quite material,” my wife said. “It was an Indian man on a donkey.”

  “That is what was there, no doubt,” the exile pointed out. “What you saw, as you have been telling me, is Christ.”

  We talked a while longer, the exile gently prodding us and making us feel increasingly credulous, and finally, with a little less than an apology, we were ready to admit that it was a trick of our imagination; and over the next several days, the matter faded from our minds. Then, one day, we met Dr. Arno Serente on the street, and I happened to mention to him that I was troubled with a large and painful boil, and he suggested that I drop by at his office and allow him to lance it. I didn’t think the boil was that important, but Dr. Serente loved to talk about things in America and in other places of the world, and he was also a very interesting and colorful talker, so I agreed to stop by that afternoon.

  He too had been an exile once, but for so long, so very long that he appeared to have forgotten, and he was a part of Cuernavaca, his longing to return to his own beloved Spain put away, compartmentalized, away deep down inside of him; and his life full of his little black bag, his rushing to and fro, and poor Mexican patients who could never afford the money to pay him, and rich American alcoholics whom he overcharged and made his living from.

  He had been a captain in the Spanish Republican Army, and finally had been driven across the Pyrenees with thousands more and his wife too, and the end of his long Odyssey was Mexico, with the clothes on his back and not a penny or a franc or a centavo in his pockets. But that was fifteen long years ago, and even long ago were the days when he had practiced in little Indian villages where you go in on muleback because there are no roads, no dirt roads or wagon tracks even; and now he was successful, as such things go, with a pleasant house and an office and a nurse, eating three meals a day and with the feel of good money in his pockets. Spain lingered on the way a dream does, but also like a dream, it blurred over the edges as the butcher Franco practiced and became more proficient in his butchery, butchered the heart and soul and hope, of Spain, until bit by bit, Serente faced and accepted resignation and the permanence of his existence here. “I will return someday,” remained locked away in a precious part of his soul, but that day had no place on the calendar.

  His office was in a little brick and plaster building past the market, and you went into a brown, dirty, ancient hallway and up a flight of stairs to a landing where a long bench and two chairs represented his waiting room and where a pile of ragged magazines in English or Spanish gave you temporary companionship with your misery. There I went at about three o’clock in the afternoon, and sitting sadly in the waiting room was the man of the donkey, the Indian who looked like Jesus Christ.

  This time I was able to take a long, full look at him, without any of the magic of morning sunlight to confuse me, and I discovered that my wife and I had been right in our first reaction, that this man looked like Jesus Christ, in the flesh, in old, work-worn Indian clothes.

  When one is for any time in Mexico, one comes to accept the sorrow in a Mexican face, even as the face itself accepts the sorrow; but some hold that no faces on earth are so beautiful as the dark, lined Indian faces of that unhappy land, and therefor the sorrow is never a commonplace. It is an intrusion, a deformity, for here are a people made for the sunlight of happiness—and always there is the mystery of how sorrow can be etched so deeply. Thus it was etched here, and I had to know something of it, and in my very bad Spanish, I asked the man whether he was waiting for the doctor.

  “No, for my daughter,” he said, and then he went on to explain that she was in there with her mother, and that she was very sick. He had the incredible forbearance of most plain Mexicans and when you spoke his language, even so badly, he unlocked some of his heart. He had a rich, pleasant voice, a tender voice, and even before he told me that his little girl was everything in the world to him, it was obvious that he was a man concerned for children. He explained that his daughter was twelve years old, and that it was both their fortune and misfortune to have no other children. Their misfortune because a man with no son looks forward to a tired old age, especially a small farmer like himself, with only a hut and a little plot of land and a few goats, all of which gives sparingly and with only the most sedulous care; yet it was also their fortune to have a child like this one and to be able to lavish all their love upon her, for—as he pointed out to me—a child who gets a full measure of love grows like a single plant in a rich, loamy river valley, waxing both strong and beautiful.

  Not all of this did I understand, missing a word here and there; but I understood all when the mother and child came out of Serente’s consulting room, for the child was beautiful enough to take my breath away, and the mother still retained a similar beauty from her youth and happiness. Though they were frightened with the consultation and with doctors’ offices in general, and though the mother’s eyes were full of the moist focus of grief, it did not lessen their beauty but rather increased and accentuated it. They sat down to wait while Serente called in the man as the father and head of the family. I could not talk to them. I only sat and looked at them sometimes, and then the father came out, and managed, before he left with his terror, to fulfill the requirements of courtesy with,

  “A good afternoon, Senor, and goodbye.”

  Then they went down the stairs and Serente called me into his consulting room.

  The boil was soon done with. “That man who was outside,” I said. “Have you ever thought, Arno, who he looks like?”

  “He looks like any other Indian, I suppose.”

  I told him about the morning on Dwight W. Morrow Street and what our reaction had been.

  “It is wonderful to be a writer, because then you see nothing just as it really is, and I suppose that is necessary.”

  “No more necessary to a writer than it is to a physician.”

  “Then it was the burro.”

  “The trouble with so many people and a lot of writers too is that they stop seeing anything.”

  “Perhaps it is your business to see as much as you can and our peace of mind to see as little. And that’s as it may be. My wife wants to know whether you can join us at dinner tomorrow, where we are having a young and honest and very brave labor leader from Mexico City, and he also wants to meet you.”

  “Why do you Mexicans always use brave the way it is not meant to be used at all?” I asked rather peevishly:

  “In the first place, and regretfully, I am not a Mexican but a Spaniard, and in the second place, the word is quite correctly used in our language. It is only when I translate it into English that it becomes incongruous, and
that is either because you have no word of your own to match it properly or because the whole concept of bravery is distasteful to the North American.”

  “I don’t want to engage in a discussion of semantics. We will be happy to come for dinner because you have a charming wife, a beautiful garden, and good food.”

  “The difference between you and most North Americans,” he smiled, “is that you are consciously insulting, and they quite unconsciously achieve the same effect. At seven o’clock then.”

  I promised to come, and then as I turned to leave, I asked him about the little girl who was the patient before me, expressing the hope that she was not very sick and would soon be well.

  “I’m afraid she’s very sick,” Serente said.

  “Oh? But surely she can be cured?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he differed calmly.

  “You mean she has a fatal illness? My God, man, how can you stand there and talk about it that way?”

  “How else shall I talk about it? I am a doctor, and my concern is with sick people, not now and then, but twelve and fifteen hours a day. And many of them die. Here in Mexico more seem to die than in other places.”

  “Do you mean that she’s going to die?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “No—no, that’s impossible. It’s not possible that a child as young and beautiful as that should be condemned to death.”

  “My dear North American friend,” he said patiently, “what have youth and beauty to do with it? The child is very sick.”

  “Granted that she is—this is not the Middle Ages. We live in a time of anti-biotics, of all sorts of miracle drugs and miracle surgery. Surely you can do something—”

  “I can do nothing,” he said sourly, turning to put his instruments back in the sterilizer. “Where you live, it may be an age of anti-biotics and so forth. Here it is still a good deal of the Middle Ages. Furthermore, you are being sentimental, and I wonder whether you are sincere.”

  “Now it’s your turn to be insulting.”