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He had fought against those lessons long and hard. He had not wanted to waste his time with letters, with numbers. Had only wanted, once his belly was full, to go back out into the streets again, away from all the relentless good cheer and pious charity. But Father Tomaso had spelt it out. No lessons, no home. No home, no food.
And besides, only cowards ran from what they feared, the priest had told him. And if it was ink on paper that he feared—well, then it was a shameful thing. For there were boys here, girls too, who were half his age and yet they were not afraid of ink on paper…
So he had endured the lessons. Endured the good cheer and the pious charity.
Neither had changed, it seemed. As he walked past the classroom block in the wake of Father Tomaso he heard a burst of laughter, childish and adult together, and then, from the next classroom, the sing-song chant of a prayer.
His eyes roved around. There was much more here now than when he had been living at the refuge. Everything was larger, with a second storey built on, and extensions. The plot size seemed doubled, too. He started to listen to the commentary that Father Tomaso was giving, indicating with swings of his arms what had been done with the money Diego had given.
They rounded the end of the classroom block. Another plot of land lay across the narrow road, and Diego saw a building site behind the perimeter wall.
‘This is the clinic. It will serve not just the children, but their families and their neighbours. With the physicians and nurses you are paying for we can provide the more basic treatment. For anything more we must persuade them to go to that fancy hospital you have built for the city.’
‘Tell me, Father,’ said Diego, his voice still as dry as the priest’s, ‘would you rather I hadn’t given the people of San Cristo a free hospital?’
The priest headed across the road, avoiding an old truck that jerked and jolted past him.
‘I would rather you gave from your heart, not your wallet—the wallet you spend your life stuffing with more and yet more money! Your wallet is fat enough, Diego. But your heart—your heart is as thin as a starving boy.’
Emotion stabbed in Diego—it might be anger. Or something else.
He caught Father Tomaso’s black sleeve and stayed him by the edge of the road.
‘My wallet pays for this! It pays for a hundred places like this!’ He swept his arm around. ‘It pays for a hospital in the city, and in half a dozen other towns in Maragua. It pays to stop our forests being logged to the ground, our rivers poisoned with pollution. It pays for farmers to buy the machinery they need, for village tradesmen to buy their stock. Its weight even helps to remind our
esteemed president that he would be unwise to listen overmuch to the self-pitying whines of those who think the taxes they pay are wasted on running schools to educate peasants who have no function other than to slave in their factories and on their estancias and ranches!’
Old eyes looked up into his, saddened.
‘You have come so far, Diego. So very far. You have achieved so much. The world is yours. So why, then, is your face as gaunt as an old man’s, your eyes like a hunted animal’s?’ He paused, his gaze questioning. ‘Why have you come back, Diego? Why now? Why have you stepped aside, even momentarily, from your gilded, glittering life?’
Heat beat down on Diego’s head. The air was perfumed with the exhaust of the jolting truck. He let go of Father Tomaso’s cassock sleeve and looked away. There was stone inside him, as heavy as the blocks of concrete neatly stacked inside what would become the gateway of the clinic his money was building.
‘So,’ he asked, gesturing at the site, ‘when will it be operational?’
‘Well, that depends,’ said the priest, the dry note back in his voice, ‘on how much labour is available. Fortunately, for today at least, we have an extra labourer to hand.’
He looked blandly at the man beside him, who could count his wealth in billions.
‘I am glad to see, my son, that those doubtless extortionately-priced health clubs you belong to all over the world have kept you fit. Now, give me your jacket and tie, and those fancy gold cufflinks, and that watch that tells you the time in every time zone you are making money in, and off you go. The others will tell you what to do.’
Diego stared at him, disbelieving what he had just heard, the bland expression on the old priest’s face.
‘Do you not think it a shameful thing,’ murmured Father Tomaso softly, ‘to be a grown man afraid of honest labour when there are children here who are not afraid of it?’
He nodded at the building site, at a relay of children passing roofing tiles along a chain, grinning and shouting to each other as they did so.
For a moment longer he held the younger man’s eyes, and then grimly, mouth tight, Diego Saez took off his hand-made jacket and his silk tie, removed his gold cufflinks and gold watch and silently handed them to Father Tomaso.
The priest took them, that bland expression still on his face. But beneath the blandness his heart lifted for the first time since the boy whom he had once found sleeping in a doorway had arrived that morning, in his gleaming chauffeur-driven limousine. Diego Saez might be looking at him with a glare that could strip paint, but his eyes no longer looked like those of a hunted animal.
Merely an irate one.
As he watched his former charge stride onto the building site, rolling up the sleeves of his immaculate white shirt, he hoped he had done the right thing. Salvation was never easy—but if ever a man was in need of it, it was Diego Saez.
The devil was riding on his back.
Consuming his soul.
