The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  All at once the Conservatives, funded by industry and by covert donations from the Church, countered by erecting enormous placards all over the country. They depicted His Excellency and Eva Perón with cartoon bubbles coming out of their mouths. Eva was saying, ‘What did we have in this country before we had candles?’ and His Excellency was saying, ‘Electricity.’

  What was most discomfiting and wounding about this was that it was largely true. Out of the kindness of their hearts the Norwegians had constructed a miraculous system of hydroelectric plants that in theory would not only have supplied enough electricity to cater for the country as it was, but would also have been sufficient to power His Excellency’s plans for industrial expansion. But there had been that business about the abduction of Regina Olsen during the time of the disappearances, which had caused so much diplomatic friction with Norway that when all the projects were completed the Norwegians had refused to stay behind and help run the power stations that they had built. All the indigenous electrical engineers had migrated to Brazil to help on the giant dam on the border with Paraguay, and would not come back to work on the pitiful wages offered by the government, and so the running of the turbines was left to people who would have had difficulty in wiring a plug and screwing in a lightbulb. Furthermore, there was a guerrilla group inspired by the Sendero Luminoso who were dedicated to bringing progress and the liberation of the masses, a project they deemed to be best achieved by the expedient of blowing up powerlines and pylons. In this way it was hoped that the proletariat could be brought forth out of the darkness by being plunged into it, and the power-cut became a way of life.

  People very quickly realised that the redundant poles snaking their way over the landscape were marvellously suited to the building of bridges and water-towers, and that the cables were excellent for melting down and casting into statuettes for the tourist market in the capital. In this way the cables were exported, many of them, no doubt, back to Norway. The nation’s lightbulbs were unscrewed from their sockets and used instead of bottles for target practice, and the flex in the houses ended up holding the doors onto people’s cars. Electrical frigidaires and ovens became henhouses, and the turbines that were left were burned out by having nowhere to send their electricity. The great dams in the mountains settled into decrepitude, awaiting the coup de grâce in the form of an earthquake or a titanic explosion by courtesy of the guerrillas. The nation settled back into the comfortable routine of trimming wicks and keeping things cool in porous earthenware pots. Community life was maintained by the installation of televisions in bars and village halls, powered, as they had always been, by generators.

  His Excellency caused to be erected some giant billboards of his own. They were in the style of socialist realism, and depicted a healthy-looking worker asking a blonde young woman, ‘What should we have instead of Conservatives?’ and the young woman was replying, ‘Idealists.’ The Conservatives continued this war of riddles by putting up more of their own. This one showed His Excellency in an Uncle Sam costume with dollars sticking out of his ears, his nose and mouth unmistakably streaked with excrement, and underneath a woman was asking a man, ‘What should we have instead of an arselicker?’ She was being answered by Lopez, leader of the Conservatives, dressed in the colours of the flag, who was saying, ‘A Patriot.’

  His Excellency was irritated to the core, and also outraged. He was outraged because everyone knew that the Conservatives were partly funded from Washington, and he was irritated because he had been intending to play the anti-gringo card himself, a sure election-winner if ever there was one. For three days he stormed about the Presidential Palace, smacking his fist into his palm and exclaiming, ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ until he suddenly had some good ideas all at once, and threw the whole party into a propaganda offensive.

  17 How Dionisio Inadvertently Started The Battle Of Doña Barbara

  LEAVING HIS TWO black jaguars behind to be tended by Farides and Profesor Luis, Dionisio set off on foot to the little village of Santa Maria Virgen. Having learned to cover enormous distances of difficult terrain by walking slowly, he arrived there before noon and accepted a tinto from the people in the first house. ‘How everything has changed,’ he remarked to the old man who brought him the coffee. The two men looked along the street towards the plaza, and the old man smiled, revealing three crooked yellow teeth. In a voice cracked by tobacco and the thin air, the old man made an expansive gesture and said, ‘Ay, ay, it is just as it was before, when I was young and getting girls pregnant behind the cemetery wall.’

  Dionisio smiled. ‘You were not so bad as that, viejo.’

  ‘But he tried to be,’ exclaimed the old man’s wife, who had not been able to resist eavesdropping behind the door, where she had been hanging a string of salted fish.

  The old man pretended to be exasperated; he waved his arms again, saying, ‘Ay, these women, it is their vocation to hold out the prospect of pleasure, and then to deny it and delay it until you are defeated and go back to your goats.’

  ‘You are an old goat,’ she said. ‘You belong with them.’

  ‘To get back to the subject,’ said Dionisio, ‘I notice that the street is swept and the houses have been whitewashed. Even the chickens look healthy.’

  ‘El Jerarca is dead,’ observed the old woman, ‘and that is the explanation. In the time of cocaine he was a plague all to himself. When we went back to chewing the leaves, everything went back to the way it was before.’

  When Dionisio shook hands and walked away towards the choza belonging to the two girls, the old woman held up her hand and muttered, ‘God bless the Deliverer.’ Then she returned towards her husband and struck him across the side of the head. ‘I never did deny you pleasure, after we were married.’

  The old man said, ‘We never were married.’ Whereupon the old woman was silent for a moment’s reflection. ‘A good thing too,’ she replied. ‘I couldn’t have stood being married to you all this time.’

  Dionisio went to find his car, and discovered that it had been decorated with white flowers. He was looking at it wonderingly when the two girls came out. One of them touched his arm respectfully, and said, ‘It is two years that you killed El Jerarca.’ Dionisio sighed, half wishing that life could be rewritten. He kissed them both upon the cheek and said, ‘I have to take the car today, and I fear that the flowers will soon be lost.’

  Ines, the younger of the two, shrugged and smiled. ‘That is in the nature of flowers.’ She ran inside and brought out a slab of guava jelly wrapped in palm leaf ‘for the journey’, which he took with thanks. Rather than trouble the aged battery he cranked the car to life, and the girls cried ‘Whooba’ and clapped their hands at the aromatic cloud of blue smoke that shot from the exhaust and whipped away with the dust devils down the side of the mountain.

  Dionisio drove into his old home town of Ipasueño and parked in the plaza. Behind him the road to Santa Maria Virgen was strewn with white flowers, an unexpected bonus for the trains of mules carrying alfalfa, bootlaces, clockwork toys, imitation baseball caps, and tambos of coca leaves compressed into cheek-sized wads.

  In response to his fame Dionisio had perfected the art of inconspicuousness. It was not that he became invisible, as everybody said, but that he would walk in such away that nobody noticed his presence until after he had already gone, giving rise to the popular misconception that he was a ghost. He walked first to the Barrio Jerarca, and noticed that it had become shabby, but that the atmosphere of menace had disappeared. He paused beneath the lamppost where they had suspended Pablo Ecobandodo’s body, and saw that the gilded church was peeling and becoming lopsided. He was pleased at such decay, because the splendour of its past had been created with coca money; it had been a shameful splendour at the price of human blood, and as everybody knows, the evils of the cocaine trade are not the consequence of poverty but of wealth.

  He went to the police station and asked for Agustin. The young policeman came out and shook his hand, embracing him, and
noting with pleasure that Dionisio still had Ramón’s gun, saying, ‘Dio’, I really ought to take that back from you. It is police property, and so it is fortunate that I have not noticed it.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ replied Dionisio, ‘it brings you something,’ and he removed the medicine-bottle cork from the barrel and shook out a thin cigar, giving it to Agustin. ‘In memory of Ramón; it is for you, if you will let me use the police telephone for nothing.’

  Agustin laughed wryly. ‘I shall arrest you for attempting to bribe a police officer, and then I shall discharge you if you will come out and take a copa with me. The telephone is in there.’

  Dionisio rang up the offices of La Oveja Blanca, ‘publishers of books in the area of the countries of the Castilian idiom’, immediately causing a flurry of activity by giving his name and asking to speak to the Sales Manager, who promptly came to the telephone, begging to be of service. When Dionisio explained that he wanted any surplus of good books that they had been unable to sell, remainders of old editions, editions damaged but readable, the Sales Manager, after recovering from his surprise, said that they had a large stock of Doña Barbara by Romulo Gallegos; ‘We brought it out thinking that the copyright was finished, and then we discovered that a company in Venezuela still had the rights, and therefore we could not sell it . . . you want me to send one hundred copies to Ipasueña Police Station? Are you serious? . . . OK, you are serious, I apologise, I was taken by surprise . . . Yes, OK. I will send anything else there from time to time that is not cheap romances and other rubbish . . . respectfully, Señor Vivo, we do not publish any rubbish.’ Then the Sales Manager asked for a little something in return, and Dionisio listened to what it was. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is alright with me if you use the slogan “Dionisio Vivo endorses our books”, but you cannot use the slogan to endorse any rubbish . . . yes, I know that you publish no rubbish, but if by any chance you find yourself doing so, you cannot use my name to advertise it, OK?’

  Agustin and Dionisio went to Madame Rosa’s whorehouse to take a couple of drinks and reminisce about the old times when bodies kept appearing in Dionisio’s garden when Ramón was still alive, when Anica was still alive. Then Dionisio went up to the cemetery and sat for a while by Ramón’s grave, talking to him as though he were there. He placed one of the white flowers upon it and then went to visit Anica. He saw that the glass across the smiling photograph was cracked. He kissed the end of his fingers and touched them to the image. He placed two white flowers there, and then returned to Madame Rosa’s to see Velvet Luisa, because he needed someone to embrace and to understand his emptiness.

  18 In Which His Excellency President Veracruz Wins The General Election Without Rigging It Very Much (2)

  DR GALICO WAS the father of the nation; his influence could everywhere still be felt, the presence of his ghost was palpable and pervasive. He alone had gone against the grain at the time when the leaders of the newly independent states were trying to outdo each other in the Europeanisation of themselves and their lands. It is commonly said that the Latin American is more European than a Spaniard, because a Spaniard is a Spaniard before he is a European. And the same goes for a Frenchman, who is French before anything else, and the same goes for all the other peoples of Europe. Latin Americans see Europe from the outside, as a whole, and so they are able to be true members of that continent without even visiting it.

  But not Dr Galico, the foremost indigenist of his time. He encouraged the learning of Indian languages, and permitted no foreign trade of any kind, his aim being self-sufficiency and the avoidance of foreign economic domination. During his entire dictatorship of thirty-one years, three months and twelve days, not a single citizen left the country and only four foreigners came in, on condition that they never tried to leave. A botanist who tried to escape was hung from a tree in front of the palace and shot at until he fell to pieces small enough to be consumed by vultures without the necessity of further rending the remains.

  No historian has ever been quite sure as to whether or not Dr Galico was an enlightened benefactor or a criminal lunatic, but this was never an obstacle to his posthumous elevation to national hero. Most national heroes of all countries have been criminal lunatics. He had the distinction of having beaten General Belgrano in battle, at dominoes, and at arm-wrestling, and had banned the study of the philosophy of William of Ockham on the grounds that there is no reason why there should not be limitless unnecessary multiplication of entities.

  It so happened that Dr Galico had taken an Indian mistress as consolation for the religiously inspired reluctance of his wife, who would only co-operate on his saint’s day. This Indian woman soon picked up as many airs and graces as a woman in her position does, and effectively became first lady of the nation. Dr Galico’s impulsive use of his absolute power saw to it that even the cream of society swallowed their scruples and treated her with supreme respect and deference, not daring to refuse her invitations to come and bathe naked in the river before watching a corrida involving so many bulls that the streets flowed with blood for two days afterwards, permanently changing their colour in the process.

  When Dr Galico died and had been safely interred in a soldier’s coffin, society turned against Prepucia (so nicknamed on account of her preferred shape of hat) and she was forced to flee in ignominy across the frontiers. She found her way to Paris on board a ship in which the sailors exacted a cruel fee for her passage, and died there a pauper’s death. Her bones were to be found in the cemetery at St Sulpice, and it was this fact that supplied His Excellency with an inspiration on that afternoon after the Conservatives had pipped him to the post in the anti-gringo stakes and he had been furious for three days. He too could play the patriotic card.

  The very first thing that he did was to announce that he intended to change the refereeing decision in the World Cup, that had seen the national team knocked out in the second round. The Hungarian referee had spotted a handball designed to deflect a goalbound shot, and had awarded a penalty which duly landed in the net. Everyone in the entire world had witnessed the blatant attempt at cheating on their televisions; that is everyone except the loyal citizens of this country. A mood of aggrieved outrage swept across the land, girls wept, soldiers committed suicide, and stones hailed through the windows of the Hungarian Embassy. It was on this tide of bad feeling that President Veracruz surfed to his first patriotic coup de maître, by announcing that he personally was going to organise a mass petitioning of FIFA in order to have the decision reversed. Accordingly his party workers scoured the country from the depths of the jungle to the tips of the sierra, collecting signatures and marks, and in party offices until late at night the faithful forged further inventive signatures which upon close scrutiny would have revealed that many citizens were called Ronald Reagan, Princess Diana, Nikita Khrushchev, Luciano Pavarotti, Donald Duck, Chairman Mao and Bugs Bunny, living at such addresses as Bishop’s Pussy, South Fork, Tiananmen Square, and the Sydney Opera House.

  Conservatives defected in droves to the Liberal Party when the cubic metre of signatures was delivered to the Headquarters of FIFA by the Ambassador to the United Nations. Demonstrators took to the streets of the capital to shout ‘Viva Veracruz’ and to wave placards depicting him in the classic pose of the statues of Dr Galico, with one hand behind his back and the other clenched upraised in defiance of the world. His Excellency arranged for a debate very late at night in the National Assembly to discuss foreign policy with respect to Andorra, and sent out letters to every Liberal representative ordering them to be there without fail. As anticipated, no Conservatives arrived at all, and an emergency motion was passed unanimously, awarding His Excellency the title of ‘The National Personification’ for his championing of the nation’s footballing honour.

  The next thing that he did was to announce that henceforth his wife would be banished from the palace in working hours. On the television news he was seen explaining to the political correspondent that his love for his wife was so great that he found
that her presence in the palace comprised a major temptation to be distracted from the business of state, and Madame Veracruz was seen explaining that, much as it grieved her to be parted from her spouse for even one minute of the day, she was consenting to the arrangement in the interest of good government. Naturally she continued to live in the palace, sit on her husband’s knee feeding him with Turkish delight in exchange for favours for her friends, and draw him away at odd hours in order to experiment in sexual alchemy; but His Excellency had succeeded nonetheless in playing simultaneously the statesman card and that of the happy family man.

  His Excellency was wondering what ploy he could implement next before he worked his masterstroke, when the Foreign Secretary arrived, excited and out of breath. ‘Your Excellency,’ he exclaimed upon bursting into the Presidential office, ‘I have received a communication . . .’

  ‘From the Archangel Gabriel, Garcilaso?’ His Excellency put down the book he was reading about the sexual magic of the Order of Oriental Templars. He was on the section concerning the homosexual practises of the secret degree, and his eyebrows had practically reached the back of his head.

  ‘How did you know?’ asked Lopez Garcilaso Vallejo, setting down his massively muscular bulk in the revolving chair normally occupied by the secretary.