live. A flat on the Left Bank, and a little house in Provence—that would be very nice. I've been telling Jacinto.” And we who were not going to France sipped the acid wine like poison.
After some years of this—when it seemed that to the success of the Correias there could be no end, as long as the army was there, and the town was growing, and the great man was in his place in the capital—after some years there was a crisis. We knew it by the Correias' behaviour. They drove an hour and a half every morning to the mission church and heard mass. Three hours' driving, and an hour's mass, every day, and heaven knows how many prayers or novenas or whatever at home: it wasn't the kind of behaviour anyone could keep secret. Jacinto Correia grew pale and thin. Then we read in the controlled newspapers that irregularities had been uncovered on the procurement side. For some weeks the newspapers allowed the scandal to spark away, and then the great pure Portuguese man with whom Jacinto Correia was connected made a statement in the local executive council. In everything that concerned the public weal, the great man said, the government had to be ever vigilant, and he intended, without fear or favour, to get to the bottom of what had happened on the procurement side. The guilty would be brought to book; no one in the colony should doubt that.
It was the other side of the easy-going authoritarian state, and we knew that the Correias were in deep trouble, that neither bank accounts in great cities nor papers for great countries could rescue them. Darkness here was darkness.
Poor Carla said, “I never wanted this life. The nuns will tell you. I wanted to be a nun.”
And we knew then—it was something we had talked about for years among ourselves—why Correia had been chosen by the great man. It was for just such a moment, when the great man might have to throw someone into the darkness. To destroy a Portuguese like himself would have been to break caste, according to the code of the colony, and to become disreputable. There was no trouble at all in throwing a man of the second rank into the darkness, someone from the half-and-half world, educated and respectable and striving, unusually knowledgeable about money, and ready for many reasons to do whatever he might be required to do.
For three or four months the Correias lived with this torment. They dreamed all the time of simpler days, before the agencies, and all the time they rebuked themselves. Our hearts went out to them; but their wretchedness also made them tedious. Jacinto became like an invalid, living with his disease as with an enemy and thinking of little else. And then, abruptly, the crisis was over. Jacinto's great man in the capital had found some way of putting down the rival who had started all the mischief. The newspapers then stopped writing their poisonous paragraphs, and the procurement scandal (which had existed only in the newspapers) simply ceased to be.
But it wasn't the end of Jacinto's anxiety. He had been given an idea of the uncertain ways of power. He knew now that he might not always have the protection of a great man, and then, for any number of reasons, someone might wish to reopen the case against him. So he suffered. And in one way that was strange, since for years we had heard Jacinto talk (and sometimes with zest) of a calamity to come, something that would sweep away the life of the colony, sweep away all his world. A man who lived easily with that idea (and liked to frighten people with it) shouldn't have worried for a moment about the schemings of a few vengeful people in the capital— all doomed, anyway. But Jacinto's big event, which was going to take away everybody and everything, was a philosophical sham. As soon as you looked at it you saw that it was very vague. It really was a moral idea and a way of self-absolution, a way of living in the colony and at the same time standing outside it. It was an abstraction. The disgrace he was worried about was not abstract. It was very real, easy to work out in many of its details; and it was personal. It was going to fall on him alone and leave the rest of the whole sweet world untouched.