Whisky Priest's Very Human Existence

“The Power and the Glory” is so profound, even to a layman. A drunken “whisky priest” flees the anti-clerical persecution of a Mexican state. This bad priest, who has an illegitimate child, embodies humanity based upon Catholicism or otherwise. When his safety is almost assured by crossing to another state, the priest feels his deep responsibility to a dying man, the criminal “Gringo.” He decides to turn around even though he is almost certain that it should be a fatal trap set by the mestizo with “two fangs.”

The priest knows how un-Catholic he has been and does not deserve a saint, but after his execution, he is regarded as a martyr among believers. At the end of the story, another priest arrives…

Greene does not tell us what happened to Coral Fellows, a precocious American girl, non-believing but affected by an encounter with the whisky priest. She appears in the dream the priest saw before the morning of his death. Dead or abandoned?

*

Now I go to the Caribbean. “The Comedians,” set in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, which is Haiti. The story develops during the brutal rule by “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Mr. Greene, what are you going to tell me?

Haiti is a special country to me. Papa Doc’s son and successor “Baby Doc” went into exile in Paris in February 1986, when in this part of the world, Corazon Aquino stood up against Ferdinand Marcos. These two episodes are my first lesson of international politics. (The first book I bought and read here was about Marcos. Filipinas noticed the book when I was holding it on bus and one of them whispered quite loudly, “Marcos!”)