KNOWING HIS PLACE, the old man did his duty and got on with dying quietly and without fuss, unseen and unnoticed just as he had been all his life. There was no final trapped-rabbit shriek, no thrashing about, no fish-eyed, breathless gasping, no watery, lung-filled death rattle, not even the last, drunken snore. He simply died like a candle.

Father Gonzalez was kneeling by the old man’s side when it happened. He closed his eyes for a moment’s prayer and, when he looked back, the old man was dead. Nothing had so much convinced the priest of the existence of the soul as having seen people on either side of life. He looked down in that instant and knew at once that the old man was no longer asleep or unconscious but dead. There is no way of telling, just by looking, if a clock is broken or simply stopped. You can’t look at cars parked by the roadside and know which of them will start with the flick of a key and which has no fuel, which has a flat battery. With people it’s different. The old man was empty and scoured out, like a burst football, like an oyster when the pearl fishers are finished with it, nothing left but torn, gray flesh.

The boy had run out of “Our Father”s and lay curled up in an exhausted ball to sleep. Quietly Father Gonzalez tidied the old man up. Symmetry seemed important at times like these. People liked to see order and death can be very jumbled so, before he shook the boy gently by the shoulder, Father Gonzalez straightened the crick in the old man’s neck, combed his hair and arranged his hands; as if he were on parade and not lying on his back on a mud floor in a shack made of packing crates and old plastic sacks.

“He’s gone,” he said. The boy was still young enough to weep without shame. Father Gonzalez held him while he sobbed.

When that had passed—and it passed quickly—Father Gonzalez asked: “Who lives here with you?”

“Nobody. There’s just me and him.”

“What about your mother?”

“She said she was going to town for a job. She brought me here. We didn’t see her after that. Granpa said she got a man and he didn’t want me around.”

“Don’t you have any idea where she is?”

The boy started crying again.

“It’s all right, son. It’s all right.” But it wasn’t all right. Father Gonzalez wanted to explain that there were people who would care for him, a place to stay and food and school and a bed of his own to sleep in, hope and even a cold substitute for love, but the kid drove down with his sharp little elbows and ducked away, out through the sack door and into the last of night, running hard.

Father Gonzalez tried to follow but he was not young. He took some time to get off his knees, and when he groped his way to the door the boy had disappeared into the maze of little sheds and shacks. Walls loomed up in the red dawn, the same red dawn that was breaking over the tall glass towers of the city and kissing the windows of the Merino and National Banking Company, the same dawn that was graying the courtyard of the Ottavio House and redrawing the bottles on the table there. But though dawn came sooner up the hill in Santa Marta, it was like everything else in Santa Marta, a little slower, a little weaker, a little dirtier.

The old priest was just as lost in the dawn as he had been in the middle of the night. He stumbled about from wall to wall, from house to house, slip-sliding in the mud and the half-dark, calling out feebly to a boy whose name he never knew until, on the path back to town, on a bit of sloping grass where two sewage ditches met, he turned a corner and found Dr. Cochrane.

It was a ludicrous moment: Dr. Cochrane tottering on his cane and the priest with mud on the knees of his black trousers, his elbows, his hands, and his purple stole wrapped round his throat like an aviator’s scarf.

Dr. Cochrane said: “Gonzalez!” with an embarrassed squeak in his voice.

And Father Gonzalez said: “Joaquin.”

“What are you doing here?”

Then Father Gonzalez remembered the singing. He remembered the rebel songs and he remembered what everybody knew: that Dr. Cochrane liked the old Colonel. He said: “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

And, because he could think of no ready lie, because there was no possible reason to explain why he, Dr. Joaquin Cochrane, respected reader in mathematics, descendant of the heroic national liberator and cripple, should be there on a greasy path between two stinking ditches in the poorest barriada of the city at dawn and also because he looked into the face of Father Gonzalez and read there knowledge and understanding, Dr. Cochrane did the only thing he could do. Dr. Cochrane leaned heavily on his cane, so heavily that it actually penetrated the soft earth a little and a tiny crater of mud swelled around the rubber ferrule as moon dust blooms around an impacting meteorite, and he knelt there on the path and took off his hat.

He said: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“What?”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Joaquin, what are you saying?”

“I want to make confession.”

“What?”

“You are a priest. You cannot deny me. You cannot prevent my reconciliation with God.”

“Now? Here? Can’t it wait? Let’s go back to town. I think I know the way from here. My car is at the bottom of the hill.”

“No, Father, it must be now. I may be close to death. At any moment, I may die unshriven.”

“The Church’s view on these matters has changed a great deal. You needn’t worry.”

“Father!” There was an angry urgency in his voice.

“Joaquin, you’re not even a Catholic.”

“I am a Catholic. I am. I am baptized and confirmed. I am as much a Catholic as the Archbishop himself, as much a Catholic as the Pope.”

“But you do not believe.”

“How do you know that? How do you know what the Archbishop believes or what the Pope believes? You believe and that’s all that counts. You believe.”

“Yes, I believe. And you don’t know how fervently I pray to be rid of it, this belief of mine.”

“But, if your belief fled,” said Dr. Cochrane, “that would only prove that your prayers had been answered, which must mean that somebody answered them and that, after all, your faith—which had just evaporated—was justified.”

“Are you a mathematician or a philosopher, Joaquin?”

“Please, Father, my knees are not what they were.”

Father Gonzalez wiped his hands on his mud-stained trousers, unfurled the stole from his neck, kissed the embroidered cross there and put it on again. He knelt down on the thin grass beside his friend, two old men side by side, one facing east, squinting into the early sun, one facing west toward the last bruised remnants of night, close enough to catch every whispered confidence but invisible to each other. He said: “Begin again.”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“May the Lord be in thy heart and on thy lips, that thou, with truth and with humility, mayest confess thy sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

“I confess to God Almighty, the Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, to Blessed Michael Archangel, to Blessed John Baptist, to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to all Saints and to thee, Oh Father, that I have excessively sinned in thought, in word, in deed and by omission, through my own fault, through my own fault, through my own, very great fault. I have spent the night in plotting how best to overthrow the state and conspiring in the murder of our national leaders.”