The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  We could exhaust Your Eminence with the continuance of this section of our report, but to put it in short, we find that there is a plenitude of heretical belief in our country. We discovered Arianism, Waldensianism, Mazdaism, Zervaism, Albigensianism, Manicheanism, Bogomilism, theosophism, Paulicianism, Nestorianism, monophysitism, and Hussism. We found numerous gnostic groups, including one that actually preached salvation through oral intercourse, and yet was composed of those who earnestly declared themselves to be Catholic. We found a nun who wandered in dishevelled condition about the countryside proclaiming that the Roman Church was ‘the whore of the apocalypse, the synagogue of Satan, a monument of dead stones’; yet around her neck she wore a locket containing a picture of His Holiness which she kissed very frequently with more than religious passion. Above all we find that the prevailing practice is that of kathenotheism, by which we mean the custom of treating as the Supreme Being whichever deity one happens to be addressing at any given moment.

  To conclude, we agree between ourselves that what we have discovered reveals two things. The first is that the religious imagination of the people is far from dead. We have found an extraordinary vivacity of belief amongst them; they expend great intellectual energy in constructing theologies, arguing about them, and observing the precepts that they develop. This reveals a profound spirituality amongst them which overflows into their artistic endeavours and permeates every aspect of their lives. We believe that this must be a cause for great rejoicing, because it uncovers to what extent we find ourselves upon already fertile soil.

  The second thing that is revealed is that this soil is untilled, these sheep unshepherded. We point out once again that many of these beliefs are shared by clergy, which points to an appalling lack of training and pastoral support. We cannot be surprised by bizarre and heterodox beliefs amongst the laity once this is taken into account. Secondly, we state that it was a severely retrograde step to close down so many church-supported schools on the grounds that only politically radical priests and nuns were prepared to work in them. This has resulted in widespread ignorance amongst youngsters, not only of the faith, but of everything else as well.

  We firmly recommend that very large sums of money be released in order (a) to properly staff, maintain, and equip our seminaries and missions, (b) to reopen all closed missions and schools, and (c) to expand such school and missionary services all over the country, until every citizen has the opportunity to resolve issues of religion according to a conscience which is fully informed of the relevant facts and arguments. We further strongly recommend that the Church be prepared to shift its attentions somewhat away from those who at present receive our greatest attention and consolation (the pious middle classes), and go forth once more amongst the needy and the sinners, as Our Lord directed us to do. We are of one mind in believing that such money would more profit the world in this way than by remaining in fixed-interest Swiss bank accounts, or by being invested in the Ecclesiastical Mining Corporation.

  12 How We Brought The Tractors From Chiriguana To Cochadebajo de los Gatos

  I BELIEVE I mentioned before that during the reconstruction of my house I had the use of Antoine’s ancient three-wheeled tractor, a machine ideal for negotiating the precipitous tracks of the mountainsides, and I like to believe that I had more than a little to do with its arrival here, as the blisters upon my hands at the time amply testified.

  In fact we have the use of two tractors in this place, which is indeed a miracle because the city is completely inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, however rugged. The other tractor belongs to Don Emmanuel, and it was his that we fetched first all that time ago, just after I had arrived to take up residence and just before I was seduced into my delightful captivity by Ena and Lena, who have now both given birth to daughters. I am so busy with them these days that it is yet another miracle that I am finding time to write all this down.

  I could observe in passing that miracles are not a great rarity around here; I would be prepared to wager my own life that this is the only place on earth where a man may meet his own ancestor in the flesh, which is what, if I may be permitted to digress, happened to Dionisio Vivo.

  It appears that during the original migration to this town there was an avalanche that uncovered the frozen corpses of an entire military expedition from 1533, at whose head was the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, a Spanish aristocrat who had served the monarchies of both Spain and Portugal. Aurelio the brujo somehow contrived to bring these characters, including the Conde, back to life. I understand that they caused mayhem in the town with their arrogant behaviour, until Hectoro found a way to bring them down to size. This is ironic, because Hectoro looks and behaves much like a conquistador himself, and his face is very like that of the Conde.

  The Conde was, and still is, remarkably disorientated by his resurrection; he refuses to learn to read on the grounds that only monks should have the need of it, he threatens people who displease him with the vengeance of the King of Spain, and he talks about the events of the sixteenth century as though they were only yesterday. He reports that in heaven one hunts and ‘goes a-whoring’, a strange thing to hear from a literal-minded Catholic of that era. He is cared for by Remedios, the leader, or ex-leader, of the People’s Vanguard, and I daresay that she is the only woman here with a sufficient degree of fortitude to put up with him. I have no doubt that she loves him dearly, but I remember that once when he was in an aristocratic rage about a dent in his cuirass which he alleged that she had put there by dropping it, and he was waving his rapier in her face and threatening to slit her nose ‘as I did with the moor in Cordoba’, she walked past him without flinching and picked up the armour. She took it out into the plaza, put it at the bottom of the jaguar obelisk, and shot four holes through it with her Kalashnikov. With her eyes blazing magnificently, and tossing back her black ponytail, she marched regally back into the house, leaving the Conde with his mouth agape, and all his rage evaporating into astonishment.

  The Conde was always prone to astonishment, such as when he saw the helicopter that came to fetch the tractors, and when he first came face to face with Dionisio Vivo. The fact is that they both have the same unnervingly blue eyes, probably for the reason that I gave above, which is that the Conde is Dionisio’s progenitor.

  Dionisio was merely strolling down the street accompanied by his two jaguars, which are even larger than mine, when suddenly the Conde burst out of his doorway and waved his rapier in the former’s face, once again threatening to split his nose ‘as I did with the moor in Cordoba’. Dionisio said something to the two animals, and they leapt on the Conde, pinning him to the ground with their prodigious weight. I might add in parenthesis that this is yet another miracle, since no one else’s cats pay any attention to what they are told. Dionisio waited patiently until the Conde had finished his fearsome string of archaic oaths and maledictions, and then demanded to know why he had been accosted so rudely. ‘You have stolen my ring that was given to me by the King of Portugal,’ announced the Conde, ‘and I will have it returned or I will have you beheaded and the hands that stole it thrown to the ravens.’

  Dionisio wore two rings, both on his left hand. One of them was a woman’s ring that he wore upon his little finger, and the other he took off and held before the Conde’s eyes. ‘This ring?’ he enquired, and the Conde explained, ‘That ring, by God.’

  ‘This was given to an ancestor of mine, the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura. It was presented to him by the King of Portugal in gratitude for some disgraceful mercenary episode, and has been passed down my family ever since. It is not yours.’

  The Conde adopted his usual perplexed expression, and muttered, ‘But I am the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura. I myself.’

  ‘If indeed you are, then your portrait hangs in my father’s house, wearing this very ring. However it is not a very strong likeness of you, I must say.’

  ‘He was a dog of a painter,’ said the Conde, ‘and I paid him only half the crow
ns I owed him, the Devil rot his heart.’

  However, I perceive that this digression is getting us no further towards the explanation of how we brought the tractors to the city, and perhaps I should conclude it by saying that Dionisio undertook the re-education of his ancestor, simultaneously using him as an invaluable source for obscure historical information, and for filling in gaps in the family tree. Perhaps I should add that the Conde has been recently agitating to meet Dionisio’s father, being under the impression that since the latter is a General he would be sufficiently warlike for them to have something in common.

  But General Hernando Montes Sosa is in truth as far from barbarity as his ancestor is from civilisation, and it is because of him that the two tractors came to the city.

  As I recall, it was shortly after the Battle of Doña Barbara, the consequence of an ill-conceived literacy project by Dionisio and Profesor Luis, that the former announced that he could get his father to arrange for a helicopter gunship to go and dig out the tractors from the mud of the Mula basin. There was very considerable opposition to this, because no one wanted anything to do with the Army. General Fuerte and Capitan Papagato wanted nothing to do with it because they were both deserters, and the rest because they had in the past suffered inconceivable persecution by it.

  Dionisio, however, insisted that his father was a democrat and that the Armed Forces were now firmly under democratic control. He pointed out that General Fuerte and Capitan Papagato could very easily go to Santa Maria Virgen for the day, and that there was an amnesty in place for guerrillas ever since the many Communist parties had been legalised. He further pointed out that nobody knew that anyone in the city had ever been a guerrilla in the first place, for the simple reason that nobody outside the area even knew that Cochadebajo de los Gatos existed. ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘I will meet the gunship in Ipasueño, and after we have taken off the pilot will be blindfolded, and I will guide him here verbally. In this manner he will never know where he has been. I will persuade him that it is a special army exercise, and I will arrange for my father to award him a medal or some kind of proficiency certificate.

  Now Dionisio’s father was a man convinced that since the Army was the servant of the people it should occupy itself in peacetime by serving them. Naturally he knew nothing about the blindfolding plan, and so he agreed to what his son told him on the telephone, and agreed also that he should meet the gunship in Ipasueño Plaza, and that the pilot should be under his instructions. And that is exactly what happened.

  The enormous machine landed in Ipasueño Plaza and caused an inferno of chaos as everybody scattered and their sombreros were swept away by the breeze of the blades. Dionisio and his two jaguars climbed in, giving rise to the myth (still current) that they had ascended to heaven in the fiery vehicle described by Ezekiel, and he managed somehow to persuade the pilot that part of the plan was to gain experience of flying blindfold. He came up with some wild hypothesis about how a helicopter pilot blinded in a gas attack might sometime have to fly his crew out under their spoken guidance. I should add that there were four members of the Regiment of Airborne Engineers on board also, but they were in the back of the aircraft and could not have memorised the route even if they had wanted to.

  I do not know how Dionisio Vivo knew the way by air (people say that he is more than he seems), but the machine arrived in our own plaza, causing a confusion here equal to that at Ipasueño. The cloud of dust that was raised up in the noonday heat was of a peculiarly choking variety, and at least one innocent chicken met its maker in the vortex of the blades, scattering blood and feathers disproportionate to its size.

  Embarking on this voyage were Antoine and Don Emmanuel, since the tractors were theirs, myself (at Antoine’s invitation), Aurelio, who was taking over from Dionisio as navigator, Sergio, and Misael. Together with the four airborne engineers and the pilot, this meant that there were eleven of us armed with spades and shovels for the purpose of digging out the tractors, but there would have been space for many more of us in that vast machine of war, which was probably sold to our own government by the Yanquis in exchange for dollar bananas and emeralds.

  Aurelio did not blindfold the pilot, as he asserted that at the end of the journey the pilot would not be able to remember where he had been; he smoked a vile-smelling concoction the whole way, saying that this was the purpose of it. He was, as usual, in the traditional dress of his people, complete with the long plait behind that in fact one hardly ever sees on an Aymara these days.

  Don Emmanuel as usual behaved most embarrassingly, and I have the vivid recollection of him urinating out of the sliding door ‘because I have always enjoyed making piss-holes in the snow’. He seemed oblivious of the fact that he was teetering above three hundred metres of empty space at the bottom of which was not a soft landing. He was shirtless, having failed to anticipate the extreme cold of altitude, and in his navel he wore a small, greying wad of cotton wool. He claimed that it was impregnated with alcohol, and that he wore it because one evening Felicidad had seen fit to explore the bottomless recesses of the aforesaid navel with her forefinger, and had pronounced it to be both smelly and full of fluff. He asseverated that he liked to conduct a campaign against ‘dingleberries’ of this nature, and seemed most disheartened to find that whilst he was urinating the wad had been whipped away by the slipstream, whereupon Misael remarked that he would have been spared this indignity had not his belly been so protuberant.

  The journey took a mere hour, which astonished Sergio, who said that it had taken many days to travel it on foot with the cattle and the mule-trains. It was a spectacular itinerary. We flew between the peaks and at as low an altitude along the valleys as could be managed, because it was warmer and because the pilot said that it saved fuel. We saw numerous tiny Indian settlements dotted amid the pajonales, flocks of vicuñas and llamas ran wildly beneath us, and we saw the worked-out mines that had once filled the coffers of the Houses of Castile and Aragon. The vibration of the aircraft set off a spectacular snowslide in one place; from our position the cascade of snow looked all innocence, majesty and beauty, although God help anyone who might have been beneath it. A more paralysing death could not be imagined.

  It became clear that Aurelio was leading us over progressively lower altitudes, because the air even in the cabin began to feel palpably thicker and more clinging, and beneath us the vegetation had grown lusher and more arboreal. We flew over a stretch of forest, and saw a thin plume of smoke, which Aurelio said was his wife Carmen smoking the rubber. It was said of Aurelio that he could be with his wife in the jungle at the same time as he was with us in Cochadebajo de los Gatos, and that no one could tell which one was the real Aurelio, not even Carmen.

  Having crossed this forest we sped on over the Mula basin. Sergio and Misael were utterly astonished by what they saw, because the lie of the land had changed completely since the time that they had inhabited it before the flood; nothing was recognisable except for the roofs of buildings and even they were greatly obscured by primary growth. The jungle was reclaiming the land, and this seemed to give Aurelio great satisfaction. Apropos of this he told us that of all plants, God enjoyed making the cactus the most, and of all animals he enjoyed making the dormidera. This last is a giant black anaconda which sleeps so profoundly that its snores keep all other jungle animals awake, not only because of the reverberations, but also because its pungent halitosis militates against sleep.

  Misael and Sergio recognised the roof of Doña Constanza’s hacienda, and fell into a fit of laughter from which it was almost impossible to rescue them. Don Emmanuel explained to me that it was because the Mula had changed course so much that it now ran clean through Doña Constanza’s swimming pool. I failed to see the humour in this.

  We flew on to the site of where Don Emmanuel’s hacienda used to be, and the helicopter had to hover there whilst the four airborne engineers descended on a winch in order to clear a space in the vegetation for it to land. This having been done, the
craft was landed and we were obliged to hack our way to the site of the tractor shed, where we found that both tractor and shed were buried one and a half metres deep in alluvial deposits, and were completely entangled and encased in lianas.

  It was midday, and down there on the plain the heat was dizzying in intensity. Add to this the infernal pestiferations of the insects, and you will appreciate that to me it was a purgatorial experience which I hope never to repeat. The only bright side of it was that we saw many animals that were unafraid on account of their ignorance of humans. We saw a maned wolf, looking exactly like a fox on stilts, and we saw a potu pretending to be a branch. We saw an ant-eater carrying its baby on its back, and a capybara, which Aurelio called ‘the master of the grasses’. Apart from that we saw a boa, a whipper snake, and a teju lizard carrying a bird’s egg in its mouth. The capybara made a fine meal when we all got home.

  We sweated and grunted over removing the roof of the shed, and further sweated and grunted over cutting away the growth and digging out the machine. The perspiration seeping into my broken blisters was an excruciation. Altogether it took three hours to perform this task, and it seemed more like an aeon, but in the end it was worth it just to see what the pilot did to Don Emmanuel.

  Don Emmanuel was, I think, somewhat depressed to see what had happened to his hacienda, and he lost his customary good humour. To begin with he was directing his picturesque curses against the tractor, the insects, and the lianas, but he finished up by cursing all of us as well. His red beard was glistening with the sweat that ran down from his brow, and his capacious belly had acquired a deep red hue.

  Now the pilot was a very big black man with a distinguished bearing, and he was intelligent too; they do not allow morons to fly helicopter gunships. He was saying to Don Emmanuel, ‘I think we should dig a tunnel under the tractor so that we can get the cables underneath.’