The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘We have too much else to do,’ said Remedios, ‘and if you think about it, we have just emigrated from the plain. Why should we want to go back down to it when here we are safe?’

  ‘But it is not the plain, Remedios, it is a plateau, and it is better for agriculture than the plain ever was.’

  ‘To me,’ said Remedios, ‘it is the plain,’ and she went back to cleaning her Kalashnikov and keeping an eye on the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, who was nostalgically drawing a diagram of a Landsknecht sword in the dust of the floor.

  ‘Bugger that,’ exclaimed Don Emmanuel when Profesor Luis outlined his plan, ‘I am already more worn out with labour than a Panamanian whore. This is a scheme for lazy times. Look how my belly has shrunk from digging the andenes.’

  Profesor Luis scrutinised the proffered belly, tight as a drum and decorated with ginger hairs. ‘You exaggerate, Don Emmanuel,’ he said.

  Hectoro puffed hard on his puro, squinting against the smoke and patting his horse’s neck. ‘Will I be able to descend on horseback?’ he enquired.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ replied Profesor Luis.

  ‘Then maybe and maybe not,’ said Hectoro, who believed that the fewer words a man said, the more of a man he was, and the more of a man he was, the less he got off his horse.

  It was true that Misael was in favour of the plan, since it had been his idea, but even he was now a little less enthusiastic about it because he had had several nightmares in which people hurtled to their deaths in a large wooden cage, and he was worried that it was a premonition. ‘We will hold a candomble to get the lift blessed by the saints,’ said Profesor Luis, ‘and then we will get Father Garcia to bless it, and then Aurelio will bless it with the Aymara gods and the Navante gods, and then it can never crash.’ That made Misael feel better about it, but left Profesor Luis a little guilty about having played upon his superstitious susceptibilities.

  Profesor Luis was disheartened, but over the next few days it was noticeable that many people were going to the edge of the cliff and gazing out over the plain. Hectoro went, and had visions of an horizon of cattle grazing on lush grasses. Don Emmanuel saw groves of avocados, reminding him that back in the village the little boys used to steal his fruit and then try to sell it back to him. Remedios saw that indeed it was a plateau, and conceived of it as a line of self-defence in the event of attack from the east, and as a place of tactical withdrawal if the assault were from the west. Doña Constanza and Gonzago went out there in the sunset, and dangled their legs over the edge. ‘Gonzito,’ she said, ‘there is a lot of privacy down there. Remember how we used to make purple earthquakes under the trees and behind the waterfall?’

  ‘Fine days,’ replied her lover. ‘One day we will go down there and find a place with no ants to chew our backsides, and not under a tree either, so that we are not shat upon by birds, and we will make purple earthquakes all over again, and shout as much as we like.’

  ‘I am sick of falling out of the hammock,’ she said, ‘even though it was amusing to begin with.’

  ‘One day we will make a decent bed, and one day we will go down there and have no need of one.’

  And so it was that, much to his gratification, Profesor Luis found that people were coming to him and asking, ‘What do you need for this machine?’ and an improbable stockpile of heterogeneous articles began to accumulate at the edge of the precipice, some found lying about inexplicably in the mountains, some scavenged from abandoned mine shafts, some prised away from the Indians in exchange for goats and teaspoons. There were huge iron hoops with pinchbolts, lengths of cable, steel wheels, pieces of crashed military helicopter, nuts and bolts with reversed threads in old British Standard sizes, a vast windlass that had to be transported by four bulls harnessed together, pitprops so old that they had turned to stone, beams from those brontosaurial machines that once crushed ore with the motion of nodding donkeys, together with their gearwheels, antique block and tackles made of polished rosewood with toledo rivets embossed with coats of arms, and a separate pile of unidentifiable objects that ‘might come in useful for something’. ‘All I need now is three thousand metres of rope as thick as a man’s arm,’ announced Profesor Luis, ‘and lots of wheels from cars, with the hubs and bearings if possible.’

  The latter was easy if arduous. All that one had to do was send out long expeditions to the places where there had been roads through the mountains in more prosperous times, or even to Ipasueño. At the bottom of precipices, down below hairpin bends, hidden beneath scrub, half-immersed in cataracts, were the innumerable wrecks of the vehicles of the inebriated and the unbraked. There one could find cars, trucks, lorries and coaches of all vintages and in all states of decay, many of them complete with skeletons picked clean by grateful birds, all of them inhabited by pumas and margueys, coral snakes and iguanas, except for the ones in the rivers colonised by fish and kingfishers.

  It was all made easier by Doña Constanza, who, after a fierce fight with her conscience, went to Profesor Luis and coyly held out a small elongated green book. ‘I still have my chequebook,’ she said, ‘and I would like to help you to buy what you cannot find.’

  Profesor Luis went with Doña Constanza and Gonzago to Ipasueño. It was just before the time when Dionisio Vivo killed Pablo Ecobandodo, and it was not a pleasant place to be, what with the addicts stopping the cars under the bridge and killing the occupants for money, and the motorcycle assassins roaring through the streets cutting policemen in half with bursts of explosive bullets. They came away with two mule-loads of spanners, hammers and wrenches, prodigious bolts, and heavy-duty hacksaws complete with spare blades. They had also been to see the manager of the State Mining Corporation’s Iron Ore Extraction Plant, and ordered a titanic reel of rope, to be delivered to the tiny pueblo of Santa Maria Virgen. It was the first time he had ever been bribed by a cheque from the disappeared wife of a multimillionaire. He waited for the cheque to clear, and contemplated not bothering to deliver the rope. But then he remembered that Mexican-looking young man who had been with her, and how he had promised to come and castrate him personally if he reneged on the deal, and he went out with orders to the driver of the largest transporter.

  As it turned out, the transporter could not get as far as the pueblito, because it could not turn the corners. The enterprising driver reversed for three kilometres until he could find a place to turn around, to the fury of a tractor driver who had the misfortune of being behind him, and who therefore also had to reverse. The transporter then reversed as far as it could in the direction of Santa Maria Virgen, and dropped the gigantic reel on the road, in a place that was as level as one might expect to find in that country of avalanche and chasm. Mercifully the reel did not take it in mind to go gleefully on its own way to some place of greater gravitational rest, and the driver proceeded on foot to the village.

  In the village, in those days in the grip of basuco, he found only the incoherent victims of addiction leaning listless and bleary-eyed in their doorways. He got no sense from anyone at all, and suffered the eerie impression that he was talking to skeletons long dead, which just happened to be stretched with skin and the appearance of life. Mystified, and remembering his mother’s adage that ‘it was not given to us to understand’, he was on the point of leaving when Profesor Luis came down the path of the mountain and hailed him. The two men walked back down the road, and Profesor Luis was horrified by the dimensions of the reel. It was taller than three Misaels and wider than two Pedros. He left it where it was and went back to Cochadebajo de los Gatos.

  What followed was the greatest feat of co-operation and determination in the history of the entire department. Almost the whole population trekked out to Santa Maria Virgen, their mochilas bulging with provisions, their eyes steely, their muscles flexing with anticipation. With them went a vast herd containing every mule, every horse, every cow, steer and bull, and, as though impervious to the solemnity of the expedition, a frolicking horde of the pet jaguars of the city. They c
arpeted the slopes with velvet black, darting after viscachas and birds, perching on the backs of bulls, patting at rocks and starting small avalanches, ambushing each other and rolling away in flurries of dust.

  It was a journey as heroic as the original emigration; by day the sierra reverberated to cries of ‘burro, burro’, and ‘vaca, vaca, vamos’; the people encouraged the animals in that soft falsetto beloved of drovers, and the animals lowed in the mildest of protest, resigned to their fate as the willing victims of incomprehension. Their hoofs slipped upon the rocks, and only the mules maintained a sure footing. By night the people bivouaced on the punas, and the hobbled animals ate ichu grass and emptied their minds of memory in order to meet the next day even more like themselves than they had been the day before.

  It was on this expedition that Felicidad realised that she was in love with Don Emmanuel, because under the stars, wet with dew upon the blanket and between her thighs, she dreamed repeatedly of the eloquence of his nether parts. She dreamed that his polla, famed charger that it was, leapt out of a cupboard and winked at her. Its eye changed to a mouth and smiled knowingly. It hopped across the floor and sprang into her lap, rubbing itself against her palm as a kitten rubs its ears, and its purring was the same purring as the somnolent snores of the jaguars asleep amongst the people. Then suddenly she was afloat in a creamy sea of vanilla-flavoured sperm with the moon above her transforming the sea to silver, and a dolphin vaulted out of the ocean, changing in mid-arch into Don Emmanuel’s pink appendage. There was a moment of terror in case it was a shark, but then she was born aloft upon it and rode towards the gap between the stars that the Indians call ‘the pig’. In the morning Don Emmanuel approached her and said, ‘I had a dream of you,’ and she knew that when the expedition was concluded she would embark upon a voyage of love ordained.

  When they passed through Santa Maria Virgen the inhabitants showed no interest; they watched with empty eyes. Only the little children, malnourished and filthy but as yet unpoisoned by basuco, clapped their hands with excitement or ran indoors for fear of the great bulls and the prowling cats. A pall of dust was raised, which settled onto the neglected houses and the leaves of the almond trees, and irritated the lungs of the addicts too apathetic to cough.

  The people were abashed by the size of the reel; ‘Ay, ay, ay,’ they exclaimed, ‘this is the grandfather of all reels, this is the one final historical reel forever. How can we move this?’ Everyone stood in silence, until the squint-eyed man who used to be the policeman and the mayor of Chiriguana, and who loved his goats so much that he had even brought them on the expedition, pointed to an electrical pole and said, ‘There is our axle, amigos.’

  It was a tall stout pole of tarred pine, a relic of the Norwegian electrification programme funded by the United Nations. It leaned over, as though it had been awaiting the chance to jump out of its hole and do something useful, and no wires hung from its ceramic bobbins.

  There was a magnificent ceibu bull named Cacho Mocho that belonged to Don Emmanuel. It was the king of all the bulls, and had been the only one permitted to eat the flowers in Don Emmanuel’s garden; he had had to stop putting gates on his fields because Cacho Mocho, despite his broken horn, knew how to lift the gates off their hinges and lay them gently on the ground. It had been Cacho Mocho who had led the cattle during the emigration, and he who had led them during this journey. His testicles were so heavy that men would wince to see them swing against his legs and crash into rocks.

  Tomás shinned up to the top of the pole and fastened a stout rope to it whilst Hectoro and Misael put the harness onto Cacho Mocho and fastened the other end of the rope to it. When Tomás was down, Pedro whispered a secreto in the ear of the bull and patted him on the flank. Cacho Mocho plodded forward. The rope tautened and the bull’s muscles knotted and flexed beneath his skin. There was a brief moment of equilibrium when it seemed as though nothing would happen, and then the pole toppled, tearing the soil away at its root. Cacho Mocho fell forward onto his shins, bellowed with triumph, and stood up. Everybody cheered, and the bull feinted proudly with his single horn.

  They lifted the pole above their heads and fed it through the hole at the centre of the reel. From then on it was a three-hour labour to harness together all the cattle, the horses and the mules, to take ropes from the axle, and to begin the formidable journey back to Cochadebajo de los Gatos with Cacho Mocho in the lead.

  Even though Aurelio had established the quickest and least precipitious routes, it was a fortnight of impediments and temptation to despair. Never has there been so much yelling and cursing, so much dust clogging the eyes and throat, and never has mankind laboured so fiercely in absolute equality with its animals. The paths winding through the mountains were useless because they were scarcely ever more than a metre wide, having been established in the first place by the navigational instincts of wild goats, and so the people went directly, Indian-fashion. They cleared scrub, heaved away boulders, forded rushing torrents, descended and ascended vertiginous slopes, grew gigantic blisters that repeatedly burst, and held always in their minds’ eye the vision of their plateau of plenty. Sometimes in descent they had as many cattle behind as they had to the fore, and always the colossus of a reel bumped and rolled, occasionally appearing to be on the point of running away on its own or getting stuck forever. Great pits appeared on its rims as they abraded away, and by the time that they finally rolled it into Cochadebajo de los Gatos they were worn completely and the outer layer of rope was scuffed and filthy. The people took to their hammocks and slept for three days whilst the animals went unsupervised, shaking their withers with an inexpressible feeling of freedom and release. When the town awoke, it was in the certain knowledge that they were a people of conquerors to whom nothing was impossible. They erected the axle-pole in the plaza, and to this day one can see where the ropes ate away their grooves. Every year somebody climbs to the top to nail there a fresh sombrero, and people hold hands with it between them to plight their troth. If they are unlucky they do the same thing later on in order to vanquish infertility.

  Every day Profesor Luis and Misael did a little something towards constructing the machine; there was no point in rushing because improvisation calls for reflection and a great deal of scratching at one’s chin and hairline. It calls for sitting down and smoking cigars whilst awaiting inspiration; it calls for copas in the whorehouse, and it requires fixing one’s eyes on the middle distance and visualising pulleys and gantries. Now and then it required departing with a team of bulls to fetch more telegraph poles, or trunks of mahogany to saw into planks.

  They built a platform with sides that folded out, big enough to take a tractor should they one day acquire one. It was reinforced with hammered strips of steel bolted around the planks, which were in turn bolted into an interlocking lattice of beams.

  Away from the cliffs edge they constructed a vast framework that would angle out over the chasm. The two sides were built first, lying flat on the ground, and then they were hauled by straining teams of citizens into upright positions whilst they were joined crosswise by beams of quebracha. Huge notches were cut, holes were burned and drilled, pegs as thick as a child’s thigh were hammered through and lashed with ropes, and then the cage was suspended in place beneath a system of pulleys made out of car wheels. Each pulley had so many wheels that Profesor Luis maintained that even a child could haul the cage up on its own, using only one finger.

  At this point muletrains were despatched to Ipasueño along with Doña Constanza and her chequebook. They returned burdened with sacks of cement, gravel, and sand, and the manager of the mining corporation found himself once more unexpectedly better off. In the meantime Profesor Luis and Misael had finished the lever-operated friction brakes and had dug out of the rock a vast hole in which to set the spindle of the windlass.

  It was a pharaonic spectacle. The whole town turned out to move the immense contraption to its place above the chasm. Teams of workers, stripped to the bare minimum save for t
hose that were naked, hauled and shoved in unison to the beat of the bata drums normally used at the candomble to summon the gods. The machine creaked and swayed as it inched along the rollers, and Cacho Mocho was brought in to lay his massive head against the rear beams and strain with all his power along with the people. When it was finally in place it was time for bringing relays of water in leather buckets from the river that flowed through the city and cascaded over the cliff, to mix the concrete and mortar that would hold the windlass in place, that would glue the cairns of rock set around the trestles of the base.

  At last the day of reckoning arrived and everyone gathered at the site of the greatest machine that anyone had ever seen. It was time for the squint-eyed ex-policeman and mayor to make a speech. He fired his pistol in the air to call for silence, and an expectant hush fell upon the crowd. He made good speeches, worth listening to.

  ‘Compañeros,’ he began, ‘when I married Profesor Luis and Farides in Chiriguana, I stated that a good man is like a good he-goat, full of machismo, and a good woman is like a good she-goat, full of gracia . . .’

  ‘With you everything is compared to a goat,’ interjected Sergio, and the members of the crowd nudged each other and laughed.

  ‘Nonetheless,’ he continued, ‘you will remember that I wished them the fertility of goats. What we see here is not the child of loins but of brains and sweat, the sweat being our own and the brains being those of our distinguished Profesor Luis, unsurpassable initiate of the mysteries of electricity and mechanical effects, educator of ourselves and of our children. Viva, viva Profesor Luis . . .’

  Here they echoed ‘viva’ con brio, and the ex-alcalde raised his hands for silence: ‘How like a beautiful goat is this stupendiferous device. Witness its grace and machismo. See how the cage is like a head suspended between two soaring horns. See how it overlooks the precipice as a goat perches on a crag and contemplates the infinity of space. See how it has a rope that ties it to the windlass as a goat is tethered for milking. We have yet to see how this goat will bring abundance as we milk the fertile plain below, but be assured that infallibly this behemoth, this notable juggernaut, this leviathan of a monster of a mammoth, this exaggeration of an elephant, will bring to this magnificent and companionable city of cats a munificence of plenty such that it will be a pitiful child who does not here grow fat and strong. Let the gringos boast that they have gone to the moon; what grows there? Let us boast that we have gone to the plain. Viva Misael and his angelic inspiration; viva Profesor Luis and his synthetico-analytic intelligence, viva!’