The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  A little clumsily in the dark, she undid the buttons of my shirt one by one, and slid her cool, slim hands about my chest, tangling the hairs in her fingers. She took me by the shoulders and pulled me onto the bed, at which point we discovered that it was fully taken up by a tangled bundle of somnolent cats. This broke the romance completely for a few moments, as we had to turf them off, no easy matter when they weigh so many kilos and are so reluctant to move on account of the natural inertia of feline voluptuousness.

  Ena’s body was a rich kingdom; it possessed the perfect generous curves of a young girl, and it had the intoxicating mustiness of a woman born for unmitigated love. Her skin was both smooth and soft, and, as I explored her with my own body, her simultaneous innocence and sensuality provoked in me a sensation that I had last felt when I first saw the Andes; my heart felt as though it had displaced itself to the region of my solar plexus, as though it was constricting my throat and depriving me of breath. I was so numb with wonder that I almost omitted to feel the shards of delight that she was sending darting through my body with her own tentative explorations.

  5 The Sermon Of Father Garcia To The Jaguars From The Top Of An Obelisk

  BROTHERS AND SISTERS in Christ, fellow ex-Marxists and disillusioned followers of Mariategui, campesinos, whores and guerrilleros, I will speak to you of the revelation that has been unravelling itself within my spirit during the long and arduous days of our perilous journey through the mountains, from Chiriguana where we feared for our lives, to this blessed city of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, where we inaugurate a better world and a new way of life amongst the stained stones of a civilisation long immersed beneath the waters, miraculously and opportunely drained through the intervention of Our Lord in the form of an earthquake.

  The revelation of which I speak is of the utmost reasonableness, and cannot be refuted either by lawyers trained in casuistry, who labour day and night to do as little as possible except swindle and confound with impenetrable jargon in order to augment to bursting the entire vaults of banks which contain their unmerited accumulations; nor may it be refuted by common sense, since it is based upon it, and nor may it be refuted by philosophers who doubt even the meaning of the words in which they express their doubt; and nor may it be refuted by the monstrous nitpickings of the Doctors of Theology who foolishly deny that cats such as yourselves possess immortal souls, and who relentlessly cavil about the mediaeval preoccupations of St Anselm and the sexuality of angels. Moreover, my friends, they create abundant schisms and contentious wranglings by their interpretations of biblical texts and the contradictions so easily to be found therein, leading one plainly to conclude that their energies would be better spent increasing the earnings of pimps and whores and discussing the number of testicles to be found within the body of a fish.

  The truth is that almost none of the Bible is true, and if anyone should know, I above all should know this because I am a priest, albeit unjustly unfrocked owing to the allegations of an importunate and deluded female parishioner. But in the eyes of God I am not unfrocked for I am a true servant to whom He has delivered His Revelation, which, to put it plainly, is that the greater part of creation is a mistake and an oversight which God heartily regrets.

  For is not God good and wise, surpassingly? We have only to look around and recall the events of the immediate past in order to see with absolute clarity that this creation is a work of malice. I was unfrocked because a parishioner falsely accused me of her seduction, and was believed. A party of soldiers arrived in our late village and attempted to violate Farides, the cook, before killing several of us with a hand-grenade. Doña Constanza then foolishly decided to divert into her swimming pool a river which supplied us all, whereas in a benign creation she could not have decided such a thing. And then the soldiers came back to persecute us once again, and we beat them away because we were inspired by God to cause Felicidad, the impetuous and desirable little whore, to infect all the officers with common gonorrhea and Barranquilla syphilis. And then the soldiers returned yet again so that we were forced to defend ourselves and bloodily massacre almost every single one of them, which in a good world would not be possible, so that we were obliged to leave the pueblo for fear of reprisals unprecedented in the history of our country except for during the time of La Violencia when 300,000 political assassinations took place, give or take a few to allow for the roughness of the estimate and the proliferation of unmarked graves in our benighted land.

  Furthermore, we live in a world where there is theft and murder, rape and disrespect in all its many manifestations; where women deceivingly simulate orgasms and men walk around deluded that they are more of a stallion than Don Emmanuel’s horse; in which our urban youth poisons itself with basuco and alcohol, for which they will lie and kill; in which there are so many orphans that one would think that they are the result of the congress of the Holy Spirit and a million invisible virgins; in which children are sold into prostitution in order to pay off debts and little boys are sodomised in secret by bishops, four-star admirals, and undeservedly famous playwrights.

  Moreover, quite apart from the malignancies of human actions, we see that nature itself is against us, with its floods and hurricanes, coral snakes and scorpions, earthquakes and shipwrecks, unfathomable diseases and discomfitures; its reprehensible conjunctions of the sun and moon so that in some places people go unaccountably mad and in others there are disastrously high tides that leave fish stranded upon the sides of mountains. Above all it seems to me that nature is so designed that all that we can rely upon is the ephemerality of love.

  What does this mean? How do we fathom it? May we look at the world and say ‘God is Good’? No, we cannot. We look around and see a world specifically designed for our inconvenience, so that we get an itch in a private place at exactly the time that we are having an audience with someone important and therefore cannot scratch it; we find that in the sierra it is too cold and on the llanos it is too hot; in the jungle which is so beautiful one is bitten to shreds by poisonous insects, and the sea is too deep for a mariner to walk safely away from a shipwreck. One goes to bed with a desirable whore and comes away infected with diseases whose cures are too horrible to contemplate, and before the symptoms show themselves one has had time to infect numerous others to whom one then owes embarrassing explanations. No, my friends, one looks about the world and decides that some of it was built according to mischievousness and the rest according to malice.

  Therefore one concludes that Satan was the architect of this cosmic prank, and God had nothing to do with it because He was resting fast asleep on the seventh day. And nor did God create Satan, because God is incapable of the perpetration of evil, which proves that Satan is co-existent and sempiternal with God, and, who knows? perhaps he is just as potent. I will tell you how it happened.

  When God was asleep, Satan, jealous of His Ineffable Creativity, slipped away and created the sun, the moon, and the stars and everything material, because God created only spirit. Then Satan made a man and tried for thirty-two days to breathe life into him, but nothing happened because the clay kept drying out in the sun.

  Then God sent down the angel Adam, saying, ‘Hey, hey, I want you to check up on what this Satan has been doing, but don’t fall asleep while you’re down there, because Satan might try to put your soul inside that lump of clay.’

  So the angel Adam went down to the earth and looked around and thought, ‘Humm, this is interesting,’ and then Satan comes up and Adam says something like, ‘Nice place you’ve got here, what are you going to do with it?’ And Satan replies, ‘Nothing special. Are you staying for a while? Do you fancy a cup of infernal ambrosia?’ And Adam says, ‘Why not? Let’s see if it’s better than the celestial kind.’

  And very soon they are roaring drunk together and already they are old friends, but Satan is on the lookout for his opportunity, and Adam sees his shifty glance, remembering not to fall asleep. ‘I’ll sing you a song,’ says Satan, and he begins this epic song comp
osed by himself impromptu in perfect alexandrines, all the spondees and dactyls and what-have-you falling perfectly into place with the kind of immaculate precision that you get when making love for the first time with the love of your life. This rhythm was perfectly designed to lull one to sleep, but Adam was determined not to fall asleep, and so he listens to the song, whose words are so beautiful and seductive that they gave Adam a hard-on and made him cry at the same time. He feels embarrassed about the erection in front of Satan, and so that helps him not to fall asleep.

  Now Satan sang this song for forty-three years, making it up as he went along, without using the same word twice, now composing in couplets and now in quatrains, and now dividing it up into petrarchan sonnets and two-line epigrams. One minute it is an Horatian ode and the next minute it’s in blank verse with heroic similes that last for six months, until finally the ambrosia begins to have an effect and the angel Adam falls asleep.

  Immediately Satan says, ‘Ho hum,’ and jumps up and seizes Adam’s soul and stuffs it through the ears of the clay man, and when Adam wakes up he is imprisoned.

  Then God sent down the angel Eve to find out what was going on, and the same thing happened to her. After that, God became wise as to what was going on and he sent the archangel Michael down to give Satan a good bashing around the head for his impudence, and to punish Adam and Eve he said, ‘I am going to let them stay imprisoned in those bodies for a while before I make the bodies fall apart, and that will teach them to fall asleep whilst on duty.’

  And so the truth is that we are all imprisoned angels, the descendants of imprisoned angels, living in a world created by Satan and not by God, from which it follows that all of the Old Testament is not the Law of God but the Law of Satan, except that Satan cleverly mixed some good laws in with the bad ones to make the imprisoned angels think that he was God. And then the angel Jesus came down to put things right and give us the real Law of God, which he did, except that he failed because no one has ever bothered to follow his law, which is why the world is still a mess and full of evil.

  For centuries the imprisoned angels have suspected that all was not well, for they were suspicious of matter and thought that the flesh was wicked and not to be indulged. I myself thought this for a short while and forbade people to reproduce or to eat meat, since this would interfere with the inscrutable mechanisms of metempsychosis.

  However I have come to understand that finally God has chosen to become interested in this material world and allow us to do battle on equal terms with the forces of evil that are locked up in men’s bodies along with the imprisoned angels.

  Thus it was that God arranged for us to defeat the soldiers not once but three times. The first time He whispered to Hectoro and Pedro and Consuelo the whore to go and prevent Farides from being raped; the second time we were inspired to piss and shit and drop a dead steer in the river to poison them, and we frightened them by putting animals in their sleeping bags, and Felicidad was given divine force to go and infect all their officers with common gonorrhea and Barranquilla syphilis. The third time we were given tactics that enabled us to massacre them without one loss of life amongst ourselves.

  But that is not the most miraculous, for when we left the village He provided an earthquake that simultaneously emptied the lake in this valley so that we can live in it, and also poured the water into the Mula valley so that the soldiers could not follow us. Then our prodigious cats, provided by God, brought us food as we travelled. In addition He provided an avalanche that revealed the bodies of the conquistadores subsequently unfrozen by Aurelio to help us build the city where we now live harmoniously like the angels that we are.

  From this it is to be concluded that God wishes us to flourish and to be the vanguard of the capture of this world by the angelic nature within us, purifying matter until it too becomes spirit. For when it is spirit Satan will have no more dominion over it, since his dominion is solely over the grossly material. It is our solemn duty to God, therefore, to reproduce and to populate the world with others such as ourselves, so that we may overwhelm the world with our convivial beneficence. Between ourselves, it would be no surprise to me if one morning we all woke up and discovered that we had got our wings back and could mate by mingling our bodies entirely.

  But until that time, let us fortify ourselves with good food, including meat, and fornicate munificently so that no one will sleep at night for the mewling of babies and the necessity of changing shit-laden garments. Let mothers be sleepless from suckling and maidens sleepless from copulation. Deo gratias. Dominus vobiscum. Amen.

  6 Ena And The Mexican Musicologist (3)

  WHEN I AWOKE in the morning I found that Ena had slipped away, and that I was sharing the bed only with the sybaritic bundle of cats. When I finally managed to get them off in order to rearrange the sheets, I found a little spot of blood where Ena had joyfully disposed of her virginity.

  That evening Ena arrived at the usual time, and as she sat down I produced a little box and presented it to her. She opened it to reveal my grandmother’s engagement ring, and I said, ‘Ena, will you marry me? Please?’

  She sat there looking at the ring, and her face seemed to go quite pale; ‘I would love to,’ she said, ‘but I think the fact is that I cannot.’ I thought that she looked miserable.

  ‘If you want to, then you can. What reason is there against it?’

  ‘It is for a reason that I cannot tell you yet, but when I do tell you, I think that you will understand.’ Her face brightened up, and she said, ‘But I can just live with you, if you would like it.’

  Perplexed, I exclaimed, ‘But I would rather marry you.’

  ‘And I would rather marry you as well, but it would be unfair.’

  ‘To whom? Your parents?’

  She became agitated, and said, ‘O no, but I cannot explain that either just yet. But I promise that I will tell you tomorrow, I promise it.’

  Bemused, I said, ‘Bueno, but you will come and live with me?’

  She smiled coyly. ‘O yes, indeed.’

  I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, saying, ‘Now come to bed with me.’

  She appeared to be absolutely shocked, and reiterated, ‘Bed?’

  ‘Yes, bed. Last night was so delicious that I have been unable to think of anything other than making love with you again.’

  ‘Last night? Again?’ She appeared to be perplexed.

  ‘Are you telling me that you have forgotten? Is this another of your little jokes?’

  She remained motionless, and then said, ‘No, of course I have not forgotten, but is it not a little soon?’

  I laughed at her innocence. ‘Come now, Ena, one can do it as often as one likes.’

  She looked very dubious, pursed her lips, and said, ‘O, I do not think that I am ready yet.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ I said, remembering the successful decisiveness of that man in Gone With The Wind. ‘And if you are not, you very soon will be.’

  That night Ena was quite different from the previous one, demonstrating once again her protean quality. She begged me repeatedly to be kind and simpatico, and at first seemed unable to relax, but eventually things proceeded just as sweetly as they had the night before. This time she stayed with me all night, waking me in the morning with a tinto, a lingering kiss, and the words, ‘I do love you.’

  Come and live with me, and we will say those words each morning.’

  ‘I will come back this evening, and we can sort everything out. Right now, I am going to wash.’

  She returned with her flesh glowing and her hair straightened out, and I said to her, ‘Querida, how did you manage to lose your virginity twice?’ I pointed to the second small blot of blood upon the sheet.

  ‘How odd,’ she exclaimed, but then added, ‘I was still a little sore from the first time, and I thought that I had not healed up. That is why I said that I was not ready.’ She was not looking at me, and I thought that she was trying to hide a smile and a blush, but I thought no m
ore of it. I am no expert upon the technicalities of virginity, since a virgin these days is a very rare thing, and was quite outside my otherwise fairly extensive experience. I asked, ‘How does one get blood off sheets?’

  ‘O, just soak it and put salt upon it, or something.’

  ‘Well, it is not important. Perhaps I will keep it there for a keepsake.’

  She patted me upon the cheek and said, ‘You will have all of me as a keepsake, and not only my blood.’

  That night, two shadows detached themselves from the darkness, and walked arm in arm towards where I stood leaning against the jambs of my door. I had been having a mock wrestling-match with one of my cats, and was covered in dust because the animal had decided that for once it would not let me win. I thought, ‘Now who has Ena brought with her?’ I realised that she was with another girl, and I speculated that she might have brought a friend with her.

  But when they emerged into the light of the hurricane lamps I was transfixed with astonishment. Speechless, I sat down heavily and reached like an automaton for a cigarette. My hands were shaking so much that I dropped my fósforos on the floor, and sat there so ridiculously with the unlit cigarette dangling from my lips, that both the girls burst into giggles. At length one of them said, ‘Does this explain anything?’

  ‘Two?’ I asked, stupidly. ‘Two? There were always two?’

  They both nodded, and the one on the right said, ‘I am Lena, and this is Ena.’

  ‘Say that you are not angry with us,’ said Lena in a wheedling tone of voice. She sat on the floor and rested her chin on my knee so that she could tease me by looking up at me in mock-penitence with those big brown eyes, and Ena came beside me and ruffled my hair. They then began the infernal double act which has been the bane and the joy of my life ever since. Lena said, ‘No, do not be angry. This all started as a piece of fun to tease the Mexicano. You know, everyone thinks that Mexicanos are stupid, so that it seemed to be a good joke.’