The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

‘Abuela Teresa,’ someone replied. ‘These bastards pushed her to it.’

  ‘Is she dead?’ he asked, and when Father Valentino looked up and said, ‘No,’ the mayor recognised him and realised that the two meddlesome clerics had returned and somehow caused more trouble. He removed his revolver from its holster and jabbed it vehemently into the chest of Father Valentino. His eyes sparked with fury and his finger twitched on the trigger, but he pulled himself back from the brink of murder and let the gun fall to his side. ‘Have you finished absolution?’

  ‘Yes. It will not be long now.’

  The mayor looked down at the abomination at his feet that used to be one of the most revered elders of the pueblo, and impulsively he leaned down and put a shot through the old lady’s forehead, in the centre, just above the level of the eyes. Never having done such a thing before, he was not to know that the back of the head would explode and embellish the feet and cassocks of the priests with a patina of blood and brain; but having done so he smiled grimly, wiped his forehead with his arm, and said drily, ‘The river is over there.’

  The two priests were horrified. ‘You have committed a terrible sin,’ stammered Father Lorenzo, ‘may God forgive you for it.’

  ‘Look to your own souls,’ said the mayor, and he called his two policemen. ‘Reinaldo, Aratildo, lock these two priests away, and then take statements from witnesses. I will have to make a report to the governor.’ He walked over to where the band of crusaders was trying to make itself inconspicuous at the far side of the plaza. He saw that there were about twenty of them, and that they were a most unsavoury-looking bunch. He felt the hollow pangs of fear in his belly, but breathed deeply in, in order to swell his chest and appear larger and more confident. He reached into the breast-pocket of his shirt and took out a loose-leaf notebook with a pencil inserted into the spiral of the binder. He appraised the group with every appearance of coolness, and by intuition guessed correctly who their leader was. He pointed a finger at him and said, ‘Name?’

  ‘Emperador Ignacio Coriolano,’ he replied, and his henchmen grinned.

  ‘Ay, a cabinet minister,’ observed the mayor sarcastically. He replaced the notebook in his pocket and took his revolver from its holster and raised it, taking up first pressure. ‘To tell the truth, I do not care what your name is. But all of you will place your weapons on the ground in front of you, and then you will step backwards three paces.’

  The mayor called over his shoulder to a group of men who were still inspecting with gruesome fascination the remains of Abuela Teresa, and they came forward hesitantly. The mayor repeated his order for the crusaders to drop their weapons, and his knuckle whitened on the trigger. Their leader glanced at his fellows as if to disown his cowardice, and tossed his carbine forward with a gesture intended to convey nonchalance, the rest of the men following suit. ‘Collect the guns,’ he said to the villagers, and then he addressed the crusaders once more. ‘You will get them back in the morning if you care to stay with us.’

  The invaders dispersed to the bars and the whorehouse, and the mayor locked their weapons in the same schoolhouse that had previously served as a temporary gaol for Fathers Valentino and Lorenzo. These two had in the meantime been questioned in the alcaldia by the two policemen, and had given a reasonably truthful account of the events leading up to the death of Abuela Teresa. An hour later, when the mayor had confirmed from the evidence of other witnesses that no prosecutable offence had been committed, he released the shaken clergymen on condition that they perform the funeral mass for the old lady. This the villagers would not permit them to do, and so they waited penitently until the body was in its grave and the people had dispersed before reciting the mass for the burial of the dead. Feeling defeated and ashamed, they went to the grotto of the three statues and passed the night in prayer, so that in the morning, hypnotised by the repetition of sacred formulae, they emerged just as full of righteous assurance as they had been before the tragedy in the plaza.

  During the night three things happened that led to the inevitable débâcle of the following day. Firstly, the band of crusaders became very inebriated indeed, being far from home, shaken up by the events of the day, and anxious to prove their virility to each other. Secondly, the whores of the village would have nothing to do with them, which aroused them at first to anger and then to a desire for revenge that was intensified by drink. Thirdly, they forced open the door of the schoolhouse and took back their weapons whilst the village slept.

  Shortly after dawn the people of the pueblo awoke to the sound of screams and oaths, and tumbled out of their doorways to behold a scene of such barbarousness that nothing like it had been witnessed by any of them since the time of La Violencia. The crusaders had invaded the whorehouse en masse, and had dragged the girls out by the hair. They were perpetrating such infamies on them that for a time no one seemed to know what to do.

  The eight girls were being brutally violated in turn by the twenty men. It seemed as though each blink of the eye revealed a new horror. Here was a girl being raped at the same time as a man was holding her mouth open and another was yanking at a gold tooth with a pair of pliers. Here a girl was being pinned spreadeagled as a drunk stubbed a cigarette on her breasts and another man urinated over her face. Here was a girl who had been hauled upside-down over a branch and was being mercilessly flogged, so that the blood ran down to the ground and was flicked across the plaza on the backstroke of the bullwhip. Most terrible, the leader of the crusaders forced his shotgun barrels between the legs of the girl who had refused him, and pulled both triggers.

  Someone mounted a horse and rode recklessly to Don Mascar’s hacienda for help. Back in the village the mayor emerged in his nightshirt, but armed with his revolver. He shook his head as if to convince himself of the reality of what he saw, and was about to fire at the leader when a bullet in his chest flung him backwards. He died unattended, the most courageous and dedicated peacekeeper the village had ever had.

  When Don Mascar and his men galloped into the plaza half an hour later, most of the girls were dead. It was a place where women became whores out of necessity or misfortune, and a whore could be one’s sister, one’s mother, or a sweetheart. Very little shame was attached to being a whore, and there was in that place none of that perverted logic of other countries where it is all but accepted that the prostitute is a natural target for violence. The villagers, heartened by the arrival of their caudillo, joined in the grim massacre of the evil men who had brought death to their peaceful homes.

  Fathers Valentino and Lorenzo, alerted by the sound of gunfire, arrived from the grotto to find that the sweet scent of early-morning mimosa was drowned in a pall of cordite and the sticky, indefinable odour of blood. The girls had been taken into the whorehouse, and all the priests saw were the sanguineous corpses of their bodyguard being carried in hammocks out of the town. Horrified, they followed the proceedings. The villagers ignored them, oppressing them with the sensation of invisibility. They watched open-mouthed as the corpses were hauled into the branches of a giant ceiba tree, and left for the buzzards and vultures that had already gathered. Neither of them had ever before crossed themselves so often and with such mechanical rapidity.

  At the end Don Mascar himself rode up behind them and said, ‘Leave.’

  ‘Leave?’ echoed Valentino stupidly, and Father Lorenzo started to try to make a point. ‘This atrocity . . .’ he began, but he caught Don Mascar’s eye.

  Don Mascar was sixty years old and had been the unofficial lawmaker, employer, judge, jury, benefactor and avenger of the district since he was thirty years old. He had done some bad things in his time, but had never enjoyed the sour taste in his mouth afterwards, and so he had acquired the reputation for justice and reasonableness that had ensured the longevity of his reign. His finca took two days to cross on horseback, he had several thousand steers, and he possessed an invincible air of authority. He only had to look at a man disdainfully, and that man would shut his mouth.

  Don M
ascar looked down on the priests from the height of his saddle, and leaned forward on the pommel with his hands in order to ease his legs. ‘I will preach you a sermon,’ he said laconically. ‘I am no philosopher, but I know this. Your religions cause wars and prevent marriages. There will be no peace on earth until every synagogue, every mosque, every church, and every temple is razed to the ground or made into a barn, and when that happens, no one will be happier than the Lord God Himself. Now leave, or . . .’ and he pointed to the bodies adorned with clumsy vultures, ‘. . . I shall let you join your friends.’ Don Mascar raised an eyebrow and moved his forefinger back and forth with exactly that gesture used by schoolteachers to dismiss a reprimanded child, and the two priests trudged away through the dust, unable to speak with one another for the horror at what had unaccountably happened to their band of the faithful.

  A fortnight later in the capital Mgr Rechin Anquilar was fired with a new fury, and resolved to combine his crusaders into an unassailable army. He had just interviewed Father Valentino and Father Lorenzo, had heard that their bodyguard had been massacred for no apparent reason, and had put their report in a file that contained dozens of others that told equally sickening stories. All over the country it seemed that innocent missionaries were being brutalised and abused. There must be some kind of satanic conspiracy at work. He re-read the report of the Holy Office, and guessed that its epicentre must be Cochadebajo de los Gatos. Even the name of the place had a pagan ring to it.

  27 The Lieutenant Who Loved Redheads

  CAPITAN PAPAGATO AND General Fuerte frequently experienced renewals of the unlikely friendship that they had forged after the latter’s return from the torture centre at the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. The General still suffered periods of debility arising from his terrible mistreatment in that place, and it was upon one such occasion, when the General was confined to his hammock with a disabling pain in his shoulders from the strappado, that Capitan Papagato and Francesca came round to keep him company.

  The Capitan and his new wife sat tickling the ears of their accumulation of pet jaguars whilst the General tried hard not to breathe too deeply, and attempted to avoid gesticulation as he talked; he was beginning to feel like an Englishman. ‘How do you find marriage?’ he demanded of Francesca.

  ‘It makes up for a lot of things,’ she said. ‘I missed Federico so much when he ran away and then got killed, and my uncle Juanito was killed too. It left a terrible emptiness that made me wonder how much I was still alive.’

  ‘Federico, they say, got married to Parlanchina after he died. So says Aurelio.’

  ‘I believe it,’ said Francesca, ‘and my father preserves Uncle Juanito’s head with the hole in it that the Army put there with a grenade, but somehow that was not enough. Now I am happy.’

  The General frowned. ‘I am very sorry about that, you know. If I had known what was being done in my name by the troops under my command, I would have court-martialled a great many people.’

  ‘It no longer matters, General. The Army gave me Papagato.’

  Capitan Papagato smiled and reached out to stroke her hair. ‘She is the prettiest woman that you have ever seen, is she not, General? All one needs in life is several overgrown black jaguars and Francesca, and one is content.’ He paused: ‘Permit me to ask, General, why did you never marry?’

  ‘I am not a pansy, if that is what you are thinking,’ said the General testily. ‘I was married to the Army.’

  ‘Was there never anyone?’

  ‘There was,’ replied the sick man, ‘and as we have plenty of time, I could tell you about her, if you are disposed to listen.’

  The two visitors nodded eagerly, hoping to hear details of great tragedy and lasciviousness.

  The General’s eyes misted over with memory, and he attempted to picture the face of the girl, but recalled only her smell.

  ‘I was a lieutenant at the time, and I had had the usual experiences of a young officer, if you know what I mean.’

  The Capitan nodded, and Francesca shot him a glance betraying some deeply jealous suspicions.

  ‘I was posted to Cucuta, and really there was nothing at all to do. There was a bar there and about five brothels, but none of the inmates were worth a second inspection, if you forgive me for mentioning such things. On Saturdays there was a Jew who showed ‘the latest movies’ in the plaza, and they were a disaster. Absolute dross, and usually the skies opened just as we were getting to the end, so more often than not we never knew how the action resolved itself.

  ‘One day I was at the movie, and I caught sight of a redheaded woman. She was about twenty years old, and I have to tell you straight away that I have always been crazy about redheads. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know why, except maybe that when I was at school there was a little girl who was redheaded, and she smelled as sweet as hay. Maybe you don’t know, but redheaded girls always smell the best. Sweet and clean. Like papaya and honeysuckle. There is something about the smell that makes me feel religious, God forgive me. And the worst of it is, that there are almost no redheads in this whole country.

  ‘Anyway, I always knew in my own imagination that the woman I would love, the woman of my entire life, was going to be a redhead, and then I saw a beautiful redhead at the movie. I could not concentrate on one word of the dialogue from that moment, because I was looking at her. I had needles in my backside from seeing her.

  ‘Afterwards I bumped into her on purpose, just to smell her, and she smelled even more beautiful than she looked. “I am so sorry,” I said, “I have been unforgivably clumsy,” and she laughed and said, “O, I forgive you.” See? I remember her very words, that is how much she struck me down. Taking my chance I said, “May I walk you home?” and she said, “As long as you make nothing of it.”

  ‘I walked her home and I think she was impressed by the uniform, because the day afterwards I went back to her little house where she lived with her mother, and she waved to me from the window and invited me in. Not believing my good fortune, I went in, and in the light of day I could see that her hair was long and flowing, and it sparkled like new copper, it was so clean. She had green eyes, and already I was in love, and her scent filled the room so that afterwards I could smell it even on the arm of my uniform.

  ‘I went back every day, and they fed me and asked me questions about the Army, and I tried to be as confident and worldly-wise as young men do. Soon everybody knew that we were courting, and other men stopped coming to see her, and her mother apparently thought that I was such a good catch that she let us walk about unchaperoned.

  ‘One day I confessed my love to her, and she said that she felt the same way. I was so elated that I bought for her the biggest bunch of flowers you have ever seen. It was so big that it filled up the entire back of a jeep, except that I brought it to her across the saddle of a cavalry charger in full ceremonial order.

  ‘Being a young man, you understand, I was motivated by adventurism of the sexual kind as much as by anything else’ – here Francesca leaned forward with renewed interest – ‘and I was ferociously bent upon doing what I could not help wanting to do, if you catch my meaning.

  ‘But she was very rigid about it. There was nothing that she would consent to, not even reconnaissance or forward patrols. No pincer movements or covert operations behind the lines. Nothing. I was in a fever. Every night I could not sleep for thinking about you-know-what, and my imagination was running so wild that once the Colonel said to me, “You may dismiss, Lieutenant,” and I actually replied, “Thank you, darling,” as I saluted. I had not heard anything that he had said to me, and my troop did not turn out on parade as he had commanded.

  ‘He called me into his office and made me explain myself. I took the bull by the horns and I told him the truth, and do you know what he said to me? He said, “Any woman will adopt a prone firing position if you offer to marry her.”

  ‘So that very evening I went down on my knees in the moonlight and asked her to m
arry me, and before you protest, let me tell you that I meant it sincerely and absolutely, as well as in hope of advanced supplies from quartermaster’s stores.

  ‘Do you know what she did? She practically dragged me back to her mother’s house. She wanted to put a handkerchief in my mouth to stop me from inadvertently alerting her mother with my gasps, and she unbuttoned my uniform. I was thinking, “Thank you, Colonel, O thank you,” and planning to buy him a big bottle of Scotch, and she pulled me down on the bed.’ (Francesca at this juncture leaned forward so far that her chair tipped dangerously, and Capitan Papagato became embarrassed.)

  ‘Naturally, I began to unclothe her, and I was in paradise. It was the smell, I was thinking, “Redheads are angels fallen to earth, and I am in heaven.” My first disappointment was that her breasts turned out to be small like a ten year old’s, and those round redoubts were in fact entirely padding made out of bags of pot-pourri, which accounted for the deliciousness of her corporal aroma. I thought, “Never mind, no one is so perfect that one cannot pass by a small deficiency,” and I was so overwhelmed with, you know, desire, for want of an appropriate euphemism, that I launched an assault in open order on her Command Headquarters. She said, “No, no, let me turn out the light,” and I was saying, “No need to be shy, I want to admire you.” There was a fair struggle, I can tell you, all in complete silence so as not to awaken her mother, but I won. And do you know what I saw after that miserable victory?’

  ‘No,’ said Francesca breathlessly and somewhat unnecessarily.

  ‘I saw that she was not a real redhead. Her real hair colour was black. And the disappointment and the sense of deception were so bitter that forever afterwards I have never been able to entrust my heart to a woman. And I never met too many more redheads in any case. And if I had, I could not have determined whether or not they were real redheads until I had already compromised myself.’

  Later that evening Francesca popped back in to see the General on the pretext of bringing him a mango. She smiled coyly, hesitated, and asked, ‘So you . . . did you do anything with her after all?’