The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  They heard the fathers condemn everything that they held sacred. They listened as Ricardo of Rinconondo was described as a lunatic, as Mohammed was denounced as a heretic and polygamist, as their grotto was described as a pagan shrine of iniquity, as they were commanded to remove the minarets and reinstate the rosary upon pain of perpetual flame. At this point Abuela Teresa rose to her feet and made her way to the side of Father Lorenzo. Leaning upon her stick, summoning all the vehemence in her frail old body, her monkey clinging about her neck, she said, ‘Young man, Our Lady commanded us through me not to say the rosary. Who are you to contradict Our Lady?’

  Lorenzo shook his head with a devout and pious pity that was unmistakably redolent of educated condescension. ‘It was not Our Lady, it was an apparition of the Deceiver. You have been misled, take my word for it.’

  ‘It was Our Lady,’ persisted Abuela Teresa, ‘she spoke to me.’

  ‘Have you any conception of hell?’ asked Father Valentino. ‘Is that where you wish to go? For that is what you must suffer, all of you, if you do not mend your ways. Throw yourselves upon God’s mercy.’

  Abuela Teresa looked up at the two priests and began to tremble with anger. Despite her rheumy vision she perceived in them a revolting self-righteousness, an appalling collection of unexamined certainties, a terrible spiritual hubris masquerading as gentle humility, and she was utterly repelled. As if by reflex she raised her stick and set about the clerics, who raised their arms to protect their heads whilst the villagers applauded and whistled, and even the bodyguards smiled with delight.

  But then the leader of the ruffians spotted his chance to earn his eternal place in paradise, and decided to give his own lesson in theology. He strode forward and wrenched the stick from the old lady’s hands, so that she fell sprawling to the dust. He bent down, removed the startled monkey from her shoulders, and, holding it under the armpits, he marched over to the fire.

  The flames were by now copious and brilliant, and he turned around in front of them and raised the little creature aloft. ‘Look,’ he shouted, ‘I will show you what hell is like,’ and he suspended the monkey at arm’s length over the tongues of fire.

  A horrified silence fell over the villagers at exactly the same moment as the capuchin began to writhe and shriek. There was a momentary black burst of smoke as the soft grey fur singed away, and then the clinging miasma of burning flesh filled the plaza. The capuchin screamed like a tortured child, wriggled, attempted to pull itself higher in the man’s grasp, grinned with agony and incomprehension, and choked in the smoke of its immolation. The leader dropped it into the fire. It stood up so that it was momentarily silhouetted, and then it collapsed into the conflagration, squirmed and twitched in its death throes, and charred into lifelessness.

  The people stood, too amazed and horrified to act, paralysed by the horrible drama of the little monkey’s death. But then a woman set up a long howl of anger and compassion, a man vomited upon the ground, and Abuela Teresa, consumed with a ferocious disdain and desolation, picked up her stick and went over to the fire to gaze upon the remains of her last companion as they shrivelled and shrank in their nest of flame. She raised her hands to her face, tears flowed out between her fingers, and then she knelt. She turned her head slowly towards the ashen-faced priests and said simply, ‘I will be in heaven before you.’

  She stretched out her arms and threw herself face-down in the flames before anyone could stop her, momentarily experiencing for the second time in her life a light brighter than the sun.

  25 A Further Extract From General Fuerte’s Notebooks

  IN THE CONSTITUTION of the city it states that ‘It is strictly forbidden to procure abortion by hanging a woman upside down in a sackful of ants and beating her until she miscarries. But is it permitted to procure abortions by means of dried llama foetuses.’ It also states that ‘All visitors wishing to use the whorehouse must carry a certificate of clean blood from the clinic in Ipasueño’, and that ‘Anyone giving bad advice is responsible for what follows from that advice’. One might also find such items as ‘This city disapproves of the Quechua practice of weaning babies by smearing the nipples with rancid guinea-pig fat’, and poetical reflections such as ‘Gold is the sweat of the sun, and silver the tears of the moon’, and ‘When the Gods weep, their tears become jaguars’.

  The constitution came into being upon the premise that anyone could suggest anything to the informal council of the leaders, and would be accepted as long as no one could think of any objections. In the case of procuring abortion by beating a woman upside down in a sackful of ants, it was Leticia Aragon who heard of the practise and proposed its abolition. She is a woman who had been the lover of Dionisio Vivo when he was enduring a fit of madness in Ipasueño; having come to Cochadebajo de los Gatos in order to bear his child, they became lovers again when he regained his sanity. She earns her living by her extraordinary ability to recover lost property, which she finds in her hammock every evening before she climbs into it.

  The clause about all visitors having to have a certificate of clean blood before using the whorehouse was proposed by Hectoro, and was the direct result of a sudden influx of curious tourists who were readers of La Prensa. This newspaper had mentioned a remark by Don Emmanuel to the effect that Cochadebajo de los Gatos was a ‘magnificent submarine city of unmitigated fornication’, and this had aroused great interest amongst a certain type of male reader. They had flocked to the city in droves, posing as traders, travellers, rich gringos, and ethnologists. Most of them bought clothing from the Indian tribes on the way, hoping in this way to disguise the fact that they were mainly urban opportunists, and it was this invasion of ponchos, unplayed samponas panpipes, and those red hats with earflaps, that made it perfectly obvious that they were not the people they were wishing to impersonate. They shamelessly molested the young girls, became drunk, and lengthened the queues in the whorehouse to an extent that Hectoro found intolerable. On top of that, there was a wave of apprehension travelling across the country that the gringos had invented a new disease that made one turn purple, waste away, and die of any minor ailment that came along, and this made the whores especially reluctant to copulate with outsiders. Fortunately, most of the visitors could not stand the presence of so many jaguars, and left fairly quickly.

  The one about bad advice was proposed by the Mexican musicologist who lives with the twins, Ena and Lena. This man may be a gifted musician and academic, and he is young and good-looking, but he is also a little long-winded and naive. One day a sports fiesta was held, with races, shooting holes in a hat, a tug of war against Cacho Mocho, a contest to see who could drag Antoine’s tractor furthest up a slope backwards, lassoing Don Emmanuel from twenty-five paces, and various other events of greater or lesser machismo.

  The Mexican musicologist had entered the one hundred metres race, and was very cocksure of winning it because he had been practising by running up the mountainside to his house. No one else had been practising because it was considered that a real man could triumph without so wasting his time and energy; there was also a general feeling that training was a form of cheating.

  The Mexican was so smug that he was spending time in bars telling everyone what he was going to choose for his prize, which was a choice of three books from Dionisio Vivo’s bookshop. He had already been in there to choose his books, and had asked Dionisio to set them to one side so that he could collect them after his victory. But Don Emmanuel set him up by taking him to one side and saying, ‘Confidentially, cabrón, the secret of the one hundred metres is to let everyone else rush ahead and tire themselves out, and then, when they are exhausted, to put in a burst of speed and overtake them. All you have to do is to pace yourself wisely.’

  The Mexican was very taken with this advice, and he thanked Don Emmanuel and shook his hand. Of course when the race started, everybody except the Mexican flew off like bullets, and he came ingloriously last. So great was his rage that he tried to dunk Don Emmanuel’s head into
Doña Constanza’s cauldron of guarapo, and had to be restrained by Misael and Josef. When he saw that everybody was laughing at him he kicked over the cauldron and stalked off home, where he sulked for two days before showing his face, and that was when he went to Remedios with his new clause for the constitution.

  A further complication of the race was that although Capitan Papagato apparently won it, Aurelio, Pedro and Dionisio, all of whom enjoy social intercourse with the dead, claimed that Federico had won it by several metres, with Parlanchina coming in second. Sergio, since Federico is his son and Parlanchina his daughter-in-law, naturally supported this claim even though he was unable to say that he had actually witnessed the victory of the two spirits. There was quite an altercation about this, until Aurelio informed everybody that Federico and Parlanchina had decided that their weightlessness gave them an unfair advantage, and that they wanted Capitan Papagato to have the prize because the books were of no use to them since neither of them were able to read. This is why there is also a paragraph of the constitution that says ‘People who are invisible to most of us should not use that fact to their own benefit’, a clause that many of the uninformed have taken to be a rebuff to distant politicians.

  Capitan Papagato has turned out to be an interesting case. It was he who proposed such eccentric inclusions as ‘If tortoises had wheels they would go a lot faster’, and ‘Bats sleep upside down in order not to be confused with birds’, and he has changed a great deal since he was my ADC in Valledupar. Back in those days he was conscientious and diffident, seeming to be married to the Army as I was, but when I returned from my captivity in the torture chambers of General Ramirez, I found that he had changed his name to Papagato, had four enormous black jaguars which had apparently been borne by my donkey, Maria, and had become a highly successful womaniser. When we deserted and followed the cats to this city, he took one look at Francesca and fell wildly in love, and who could blame him?

  She is only seventeen, she is most vivacious and gentle, and she is pretty in the way that these girls are before they are ravaged by childbirth and travail. She has quite long and curly black hair, and one’s eyes cannot resist following the curves of her body down past those pert little breasts and her flat stomach in order to come to rest at the apex of her thighs. One could pass quite a lot of time in a reverie, imagining how she appears when naked, and this, I fancy, is what Capitan Papagato found himself doing. I think that the most appealing thing about her is that the corners of her mouth have a small natural curve upward, which gives her a permanently smiling expression, but I would also have to concede that her heavy eyebrows perfectly set off her glowing brown eyes, and that, too, is very fetching indeed.

  Capitan Papagato began to find himself outside her house on the slightest of pretexts, and very sensibly tried to make it look as though his real interest lay in befriending her father, Sergio. Every evening he would return to me and say, ‘General, today she smiled at me twice,’ or, ‘General, today she wore a flower in her hair; do you think it could be a message?’ and I would have to listen to all this and give him my opinion. I advised him always to take his jaguars with him so that their hands might cross in the process of stroking them, and to provide an unfailing topic of conversation: ‘Are they well today? Are they not very big?’ and so on. He reported that when their hands touched, she did not withdraw her own, and we took this to be an encouraging indication.

  One day he came into my house with such a spring in his step that I thought he was likely to raise the thatch with his head, and it turned out that this was because he had found her in his path as he went out one evening for a stroll with the cats. Remedios told me later that she had seen Francesca tailing the Capitan, and then breaking into a run in order to circle him and find herself ‘accidentally’ in his itinerary. Naturally they took the paseo together, and things happened in such a rush that when they returned they had not only lips bleeding from kissing, but had decided to marry. Capitan Papagato told me that she was a little afraid of men because Federico’s last words to her had been to the effect that she should be cautious of them, and she wished to honour this last request.

  He went to ask Sergio for his permission, and was told that it was the custom to send a ‘talker’ rather than to ask directly. This talker has to be an older person who is respected, and of course I fell right into the trap and was obliged to take on the rôle. It is unbelievable how tedious this is. Whilst Francesca and her lover were out amongst the rocks amusing themselves, I had to act almost as though I myself were the suitor. Thus the first time I visited I was not allowed to mention the affair at all, and I had to sit there all evening drinking pisco and puffing in silence upon one cigar after another. On the second evening I had to do the same, except that at some point I had to say, ‘Francesca is very pretty, is it not time to send her to a new home?’

  On the third evening I had to say, ‘Capitan Papagato is a very fine fellow; do you not think it is time that he was married to a respectable girl?’ and on the fourth evening I had to bring up the subject directly by saying, ‘Capitan Papagato and Francesca are making a great scandal by going out together, do you not agree that we should put an end to it and put them together in a house?’ All this is strictly formulaic, as was Sergio’s reply: ‘How will he provide for her? Let him bring gifts to show that he has enough.’

  Poor Capitan Papagato had to bring four sacks of maize, two of potatoes, a sheep, a pair of army boots and a copy of my pop-up book on the nation’s butterflies before Sergio gave his consent to the betrothal. It seems that here it is normal to live together for some years before undergoing marriage, and that initially it is enough merely to become betrothed. Perhaps this is a relic of the way in which the Church tended to sanctify marriages that had already been contracted by indigenous methods.

  Virtually all that I can remember of what happened next is that I had an excruciating hangover on account of three days of fiesta, and Josef told me that at one point I climbed onto the roof of Gonzago’s house and urinated onto Misael’s donkey. I pray to God that this is untrue. As for Francesca and the Capitan, I was told by Remedios that Doña Constanza had been told by Gloria that Francesca had told her that the Capitan is ‘an absolute stud’, and he in turn confided to me that ‘Francesca is insatiable, thank God.’ The two of them have moved into the house next to mine, and they have constructed a bed large enough to accommodate themselves and the four jaguars all at once, which means that the back room is one entire bed. They make such a racket during siesta that I have taken to having mine with my ears plugged with wax, but since Felicidad and Don Emmanuel are on the other side and Doña Constanza and Gonzago are opposite, I may as well give up the idea of peaceful sleep unless I move somewhere else.

  26 The Massacre At Rinconondo

  THE MAYOR OF Rinconondo appeared in the plaza with his two policemen at precisely the moment when hysteria had overtaken almost all the members of the assembly. He had been out at Don Mascar’s hacienda investigating a suspected case of cattle poisoning, and had spent the most part of what should have been siesta wandering from one bloated corpse to another in the stupefying heat with a handkerchief over his nose. Since Don Mascar was to all intents and purposes the local caudillo, it stood to reason that he might have all kinds of enemies; a fired foreman, perhaps, or a peon who suspected that the indiscreet bulge in his daughter’s belly was owed to the patron. But one of the policemen had spotted the tip of a horn poking above the surface of the waterhole, and the conclusion was drawn that the cattle had indeed been poisoned, but by one of their own kind. Although it was not their civic duty to do so, the mayor and the policemen had assisted the peons in the objectionable task of removing the offending steer, and were now attired in clothes borrowed from Don Mascar himself, who had gratefully offered to have their own garments cleaned by one of his washerwoman. In such areas everyone understands the value of keeping relations sweet between the caudillo and the organs of law-enforcement.

  And so it was that t
he three men arrived back in Rinconondo just as Abuela Teresa was being dragged by her feet out of the flames. There was a tight bunch of people gathered around her, so that at first it was not at all clear what was happening. They heard the terrible keening of grieving women, the angry shouts of men, and became aware that there were present a number of shifty and hostile-looking strangers who were very heavily armed.

  The mayor stroked his stubble, summoned up his courage and his habitual air of decisive machismo, and waded into the knot of people. What he beheld at first was two priests kneeling beside the body of a woman to whom they were administering the last rites, and when he leaned over to try to discover the identity of the woman, he recoiled with a shock that struck him like a blow in the face. He saw a head that was without features. It was a bloody soup of liquids and livid flesh, studded with morsels of charcoal and smouldering wood; there were huge yellow blisters, and from the distorted mouth there came a groan that he had last heard when one of his men had been eviscerated by the horn of a bull during a fiesta. The crowd fell silent, as though suddenly attuned to his own astonishment. ‘Who is this?’ he demanded.