The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  General Fuerte smiled distantly and shifted to clear a dart of pain from his neck. His face brightened, and he tapped the side of his nose. ‘My memory fails me,’ he said, and he winked.

  28 In Which His Excellency President Veracruz Fiddles While Medio-Magdalena Burns

  THERE HAS BEEN much argument amongst historiosophists as to what conditions must pertain in order for history to occur. There are those who argue for the neccessity of correct social conditions, and much energy is spent scrutinising the relation between the economic base and the cultural superstructure, and there are those who argue that history is a plastic medium in the hands of those who rise to greatness.

  There has also been much argument amongst historians as to how the New Albigensian Crusade could possibly have occurred. From every angle it appears that such a phenomenon should have been utterly impossible at such a late stage of civilisation, when it was beginning to appear that there was so much peace that history had virtually stopped happening at all. Surely, the historians feel, mankind had already reached the stage when almost everyone recognised that no belief was so certain that it was worth killing for. Surely we had become sufficiently religiously mature not to have to bother about whether or not the Blessed Virgin was immaculately conceived, or whether or not one’s neighbour believed in the literal resurrection of the body?

  Such historians are possibly out of touch with reality, being insufficiently cynical about people’s motives, because the New Albigensian Crusade, like all such outbreaks of puzzling fanaticism, was about venality and power as well as a certain unfortunate combination of circumstances.

  In the first place it was unfortunate that His Eminence, Cardinal Guzman, was so anxious to save his own soul and then became too ill to understand what he had set in motion. In the second place it was impossible for him to have known in advance how Monsignor Rechin Anquilar would handle his accumulating power and influence, and we have to bear in mind that His Excellency, President Veracruz, was away on a world tour that had very little to do with the conduct of internal affairs. His cabinet were confused and at odds with each other throughout his absence, and in addition were more or less completely unaware of what was going on because events mostly occurred in the countryside of a land where politicians only took any notice of what happened in the towns, and especially in the capital.

  The Armed Forces were in command of General Hernando Montes Sosa, Dionisio Vivo’s father, and he was a man so conscientious and principled that he would not take unilateral military action without a Presidential directive, and one has to bear in mind that they were obsessively entangled in the cocaine wars of Medio-Magdalena, a fact worthy of explanation.

  It all began with guerrilla groups that in the first stages of their activities were welcomed and supplied by the campesinos, who saw as their only hope of survival the establishment of a Communist state which would redistribute more equitably the profits of production. In the interim they hoped that the guerrillas would protect them against the Army, which at that time was under the command of General Ramirez, and which seemed to be little more than a state-funded organisation for the perpetration of rape and pillage, under the aegis of local commanders who were nothing other than rural satraps.

  There was a brief honeymoon between the guerrillas and the peasants. To begin with, the first question demanded of a peon by a guerrilla chief was, ‘How does your landlord treat you? Do you want us to sort him out?’ and many a landlord found himself hung up by his feet and beaten, or hung up by his neck and disembowelled. The Army, either through incompetence, cowardice or discretion, made itself noticeably absent, and the guerrillas had a free hand to slot with immaculate precision into the place it had left vacant. Peasants were now raped and pillaged by guerrillas who demanded supplies and other privileges with the aid of unveiled threats that amounted to extortion and blackmail, and they killed the very same kinds of people as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ that the Army had used to kill as ‘subversives’. There was soon an almost complete shortage of teachers, priests, doctors, mayors, and agronomists. The peasants went to their landlords and asked for protection.

  These latifundistas, who had greatly cleaned up their act on account of their fear of the guerrillas, leapt at the chance to improve industrial relations, and appealed to the government to protect their peons. The government appealed to the Army, which just then was a little too busy to arrive in person (because of incompetence, cowardice or discretion), and so they sent supplies of arms in order that the peasants might defend themselves.

  These new paramilitary groups enjoyed a honeymoon period. The guerrillas retreated further into the jungle and passed their time stinging with jiggers and acquiring fungal infections of the feet, and the campesinos rebuilt their fincas and schools, and went back to work. But the paramilitaries now had very little to do, their trigger fingers were itchy, and the taste of blood and the exhilaration of battle were fresh upon their tongues.

  Providentially the cocaine lords moved in. As demand grew exponentially in the United States, they very logically expanded production by moving into Medio-Magdalena. They obtained huge tracts of land, and their men raped and pillaged in the time-honoured tradition, except that they did not repeat the mistakes of the guerrillas. They bought the services of the paramilitaries, who now formed death-squads that roamed the countryside liquidating the teachers, priests, doctors, mayors and agronomists who spoke out against them.

  At this point the command of the Army passed to Hernando Montes Sosa, and he took swift action against the coca lords. The Army saturated the area, and immediately came up against one of the strangest alliances in the history of the world. The coca caciques and the most powerful right-wing landlords began to supply the Communist guerrillas with weapons to keep the Army busy so that they could carry on as ‘narcotraficos’ and exploitative employers in relative peace, and the paramilitaries now became allied with the guerrillas because the Army were trying to disarm them. The uncriminalised portion of the civilian population now hailed the Army as saviours, and it spent its time protecting teachers, priests, doctors, mayors and agronomists – those whom, in short, it used to persecute as subversives. This is not to say, of course, that certain renegade Army commanders did not take advantage of the situation in order to rape and pillage a little in their spare time.

  And so it was on account of the mayhem in Medio-Magdalena that the Armed Forces were preoccupied at the time of a crusade of whose existence they were unaware, and were in any case unable to intervene owing to His Excellency’s personal crusade for occult knowledge and push-button virility.

  His Excellency lay in bed playing with his executive polla, which now had the extraordinary ability to be erected any time and for any period that the fancy took him. He had arrived at the hospital in California a month previously, suffering from fits of queasiness and apprehension. It is no light thing to voluntarily undergo an operation upon a vital piece of intimate equipment which suffers from no fundamental faults, and the mental image of a scalpel slitting dramatic cuts into his nether parts was not one to ease the mind. In fact, if it had not been for the persistent encouragement of Madame Veracruz, he probably would not have managed to face it, and would have checked himself ignominiously out of the hospital.

  ‘O, Daddykins,’ she would say in her most wheedlingly saccharine voice, ‘just think of all the fun we could have and all the alchemy we could do,’ and he would make a dubious face and wonder if all Panamanian wives were so enthusiastic. Certainly the Foreign Secretary said that they had the hottests tails in the world, but Emperador Ignacio Coriolano maintained that you could not beat a mulatta from Bahia.

  President Veracruz had two hydraulic sacs inserted into the erectile tissue of his polla, a sac of fluid inserted into his abdomen, and a small pump mounted discreetly in his scrotum. The whole device worked with a system of automatic valves, and when he woke up afterwards the pain was excruciating. The gringo doctors filled him up with a veritable pharmacopoeia of
painkillers, and for a week he sincerely believed that he had been the unwitting victim of an elaborate Communist plot to kill him, which was why he refused to speak to his wife. She went to New York and at the taxpayers’ expense bought some alligator shoes for two thousand dollars which she could have bought at home for two thousand pesos, since the unfortunate alligator had really been a cayman.

  After four weeks His Excellency was feeling better, and had begun to play with his new apparatus. He squeezed the little pump in his scrotum, and, miraculously, his polla rose and swelled. In fact he could make it swell so tightly that the sensation was arousing in itself, and then the blood rushed in and made it swell even more. He had not felt such tightness and tautness since he was sixteen and so desperate for appeasement that he could have done it with a pig. living or dead. ‘Whooba,’ he exclaimed, like a vaquero who has just lassoed a difficult calf, and then, ‘Whooba,’ again as he squeezed the pump the other way and his polla subsided gently like the sleepy head of a drunk. He pumped it up again and was admiring its impressive firmness when the nurse opened the door and came in. Hastily he covered himself with the sheet and blushed crimson. ‘Enjoying ourselves with our new toy, are we?’ she said, and His Excellency attempted to stand on his dignity. ‘One has to ensure that one has had one’s money’s worth. I was doing it in a purely scientific spirit.’

  ‘Scientists play with themselves as well,’ remarked the nurse, and His Excellency was on the point of sacking her for impertinence when he remembered that he was in the United States. ‘I came in to tell you that Señora Veracruz has telephoned to say that she will be coming to visit you this evening, and that you are to expect a present.’

  ‘O, thank you,’ he said, and discreetly squeezed the pump so that the erection would go away and allow him to lower his knees, which he had raised because his tumescent organ would have supported the sheet like a tentpole and the nurse would have noticed. ‘I am sorry I disturbed you,’ said the nurse, and she added confidentially, ‘Everybody plays with it until the novelty wears off.’

  Madame Veracruz came in that evening looking stunning. She had popped into the ‘power room’ in order to don animal skins and a horned helmet so that she might appear as Freya. She and His Excellency had by now worked through the Egyptian and Greek pantheons, believing that to make love dressed as a god and performing an intent visualisation at the moment or orgasm was an infallible way of achieving one’s ends, and now they had decided to work through the Norse pantheon as well, having tired of Isis and Osiris, Ares and Aphrodite, Apollo and Kyrene, Set and Nephthys.

  ‘You look wonderful, my dear,’ he said. ‘I am not sure that the long blonde wig is entirely necessary, though. I imagine it could become very itchy.’

  ‘O,’ she replied, ‘I shouldn’t wear so much nail polish either. I don’t think they had nail polish. Look, I have brought you an Odin costume.’ She unpacked from a small suitcase an eyepatch, a cloak, a large floppy hat, and two taxidermised ravens that had seen better days. She held them out. ‘This one’s called Hugin and you wear it on one shoulder, and this one’s called Munin, which you wear on the other.’

  ‘Let me try it all on,’ said His Excellency, clambering out of bed and taking off his nightgown. He donned the cloak and the eyepatch, placed the hat on his head at an angle suitable for haunting gibbets, and tried to perch the ravens on his shoulder. They kept falling off, and one of them added a cracked beak to its list of injuries. ‘I’ll sew them onto the cloak by their feet,’ said Madame Veracruz with a concerned expression.

  ‘This is a wonderful present, my little pussycat, thank you very much. I am going to find out all about Odin so that I can assume his form effectively.’

  ‘O, this isn’t your present,’ she said, and shyly she reached into the bag and produced a cylindrical object wrapped in cheerfully coloured paper. He reached out and took it, trying to guess at what it was. Madame Veracruz pulled a sour face at one of his suggestions. ‘We don’t need one of those now that we have your new thingammy,’ she said.

  His Excellency unwrapped it and found that it was a portion of branch. He looked perplexed and said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a bit of branch.’

  ‘Yes, but what is it for, this piece of branch?’

  ‘It’s a pet, silly.’

  ‘A pet? What kind of pet is a branch? Shouldn’t we have a parrot to sit on it, or something, and then we would have a pet?’

  ‘It’s the latest fashion,’ she said. ‘All over the United States people have bits of branch as a pet. You put it somewhere and you talk to it, or you can stroke it and it puts you in touch with your natural self. Even the President has one, and everybody is throwing away their pet rocks and their cabbage-patch children and their couch-potatoes.’

  ‘Perhaps everybody is throwing away their dogs as well,’ said His Excellency. ‘Ay, these gringos, I will never understand them. I still think my idea was better.’

  Madame Veracruz smiled coyly and looked at him with her most calculatedly fetching sideways glance. ‘You will have to peel the bark off first.’ Then she turned around and popped her head out of the door to check that no one was coming, came back in and said, ‘Now let’s play with our new toy. I want to see it work.’ She parted his gown and began a countdown as he squeezed the bulb.

  She was impressed. ‘Daddykins,’ she said, ‘it’s made it go longer and thicker. I just can’t wait. Now make it go down.’

  She watched it sink its head and resume its gentle repose. ‘Not bad for a man of nearly eighty years, is it?’ said His Excellency proudly.

  ‘I want to try it,’ she exclaimed, and she shot her hand forward and squeezed.

  ‘Ay, ay, ay, Madre de Dios, qué puta de hijo de perra!’ shouted His Excellency, grabbing her by the wrist and wrenching her hand away. ‘For the love of God, that was my testicle.’

  Madame Veracruz was abashed and guilt-stricken, and, attracted by the outcry, the nurse walked in just as she was bending down to kiss it better. It would be hard to describe accurately the nurse’s impression of what it is like to see two Norse gods apparently engaged in a most egregious act of fellatio in a private hospital room; suffice it to say that she left precipitately, and shortly afterwards the faces of other nurses began to appear at the window at disconcertingly frequent intervals, hoping to witness either a repeat performance or something equally interesting.

  It is sad to report that two days later His Excellency had to summon the surgeon and inform him that the apparatus was no longer functioning. This grave news was greeted by a resigned shake of the head and a scholarly smile. ‘I am afraid that one of the valves has stopped working,’ said the doctor. ‘It happens occasionally. We will have to open you up and install another.’

  Madame Veracruz made him go through with it, and it only cost the taxpayer a few more thousand dollars. Meanwhile, in Medio-Magdalena, the death toll reached six thousand, the situation became exacerbated because the coca lords recruited British and Israeli mercenaries, and more bodies bumped their way along the bed of the river Magdalena with their stomachs filled with stones.

  Felipe Galtan, father of one of the three assassinated presidential hopefuls who had campaigned upon an anti-coca ticket, was quoted in La Prensa as saying that, ‘Never in any country have so many tragedies happened at the same time.’

  29 Concepcion Buys His Eminence A Present

  IT WAS THE Cardinal’s name-day, and Concepcion took Cristobal’s hand and led him out into the thoroughfare in order to search for a gift. Name-days were always a problem to her because she had no salary to speak of, living off what was provided in terms of food and accommodation by the facilities of the palace. Normally she could go to the Cardinal to ask for money when she or Cristobal needed any particular item, but naturally she could not go to him in order to ask for money with which to buy him a present. She took a ring that was all that she had left of her mother, and sold it for a pittance to a ‘Syrian’ who persuaded her that it was not r
eal gold; he gave her enough to buy more medicines from the brujo in the slums, and a present for the Cardinal.

  ‘It is getting worse,’ she told the medicine-man. ‘His belly swells like a woman with child, and his mind is unclear so that one of these days I am afraid that he will not recognise himself in a mirror. What can be done?’

  The brujo cast cowrie shells upon the mat at his feet, and squatted over them, furrowing his brow in the effort of interpretation. ‘Does he still see demons?’

  Concepcion nodded fearfully. ‘It is very bad these days.’

  The brujo took a deep draw of his cigar and blew the smoke over the shells to help them speak. ‘He has a bad conscience.’

  ‘He has always had a bad conscience, Master.’

  ‘You should be careful of the child, Señora. Apart from his relentless picking of his nose, which will sooner or later cause bleeding and lead to an infestation of worms from beneath his fingernails, I think that there are going to be problems for him. Look, I threw the shells to ask about your man, and I got the configuration that means “Child”.’

  ‘It means nothing to me, Master.’ Concepcion looked around the tin shack with its festoons of dried herbs and shrivelled llama foetuses. She shivered at the ekekko, the household god that guarded the doorway, and tried to avoid wondering whether or not its wild hair came from a corpse. It features were picked out in lines of cowrie shells, and its expression of amused and detached knowledgeability caused her to feel uneasy.

  ‘I will put vilco in the medicine,’ said the brujo, ‘and it will make him much worse. He will see the demons more clearly and he will be more terrified than ever, so you must be prepared for that, and understand that I am causing a crisis that will get it all over with much quicker. Are you prepared for that?’