Pope

Pope is a man of Malpais whose recurring visits to Linda become a source of conflict in John’s childhood and a lasting presence in John’s memories. To Linda, Pope brings mescal; to John, he is associated with his mother’s altered states, the hostility directed at her, and an enduring sense of exclusion. Years later, Linda’s final illness brings Pope back into her speech, even as John tries to reach her.

Childhood, Conflict, and Memory

Pope’s visits also become part of the childhood memories through which John understands his relationship with Linda. John recalls that Pope often arrived with mescal, which Linda drank before going to bed; John hated Pope and the other men who came to see her. This domestic pattern is interwoven with John’s experience of rejection: Linda once left him shut outside a room while she helped local women, and he later witnessed those women turn against and punish her. The memories do not make Pope the cause of every hostility surrounding Linda, but they place him within the world in which John felt powerless to protect her and unable to claim her attention.

The Knife Attack and Its Aftermath

John’s hostility toward Pope reaches a decisive point when he finds him asleep beside Linda. Drawing on words from Shakespeare, John takes a kitchen knife and attacks him. Pope wakes and catches John’s wrist, stopping him from striking again; the encounter ends with John crying while Pope tells him to go. The episode complicates John’s hatred: Pope does not retaliate, and the memory remains tied not only to violence but also to John’s shame and vulnerability. Later, when John tries to summon gentler memories of Linda, Pope’s cut shoulder and the spilled mescal return among the painful images he cannot keep away.

The Final Return of Pope

During Linda’s last illness at the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, John struggles to recover memories of her tenderness, repeating the alphabet and vitamin words associated with her songs to him as a child. Instead, memories of hardship intrude, including Pope’s injured shoulder and the mescal spilled beside Linda’s bed. When Linda wakes briefly amid the hospital’s music and perfume, she murmurs Pope’s name. John begs her to recognize him, and she does identify him as her son, but her drugged, dreamlike awareness folds him into an imagined scene with Pope. Her repeated appeal to Pope leaves John feeling rejected again; in grief and anger, he shakes her, then watches her breathing fail. Pope is not present in this scene, but his name becomes the last obstacle between John and the recognition he seeks from his mother.

Significance

Pope’s importance in the novel is largely mediated through John’s memories and Linda’s final words. He is a recurring visitor who brings mescal, an object of John’s childhood resentment, and a name that resurfaces at the moment John is trying to hold onto his mother. That recurrence binds the domestic world of Malpais to Linda’s later soma holiday: the substances differ, but both are associated with her withdrawal from John’s reach. Pope’s role is therefore less a separately developed personal arc than a thread in the story of John’s attachment to Linda, his anger at being excluded, and the painful return of the past as she dies.