The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Mama told me that two countries went to war once because of a football match,’ said Cristobal, searching through the day’s events to find something that might prolong the conversation past his bedtime.

  ‘People always go to war over stupid things,’ replied his father. ‘Do you want to sit on my knee?’

  ‘You smell of sick, though,’ complained the boy, wrinkling up his nose. ‘I’ll sit on your knee if you let me play with your cross. It’s nice and shiny and it’s heavy, and it’s better than wood, and anyway, football isn’t stupid.’

  ‘Yes it is,’ said the Cardinal, taking the Christus Rex from about his neck, and handing it over.

  ‘Isn’t,’ said Cristobal with conviction, settling onto his father’s lap, and ferreting inside his nose for any tender morsel that he might have missed during one of his previous excavations.

  His Eminence watched Cristobal disapprovingly inspecting the disappointing harvest on the end of his finger, and felt a flood of affection cascade into his heart. ‘I love you, Cristobal,’ he said simply.

  The little boy bounced in his father’s lap, put his arms around his neck and kissed him wetly on the cheek. ‘I love you too,’ he replied, and then, ‘if your tummy gets any bigger I won’t have room on your lap anymore, will I? Mama says that you must have something growing in there. When I kiss you it feels all stubbly.’

  His Eminence smiled, ‘It’s one of the prices you pay for becoming a man.’

  ‘Getting fat?’

  ‘No, silly, getting stubbly. And this isn’t fat, it’s a hurt.’

  ‘Are you going to die?’

  The directness of the question momentarily stunned the cleric, and forced him suddenly to contemplate a real possibility. Cristobal watched his face and continued, ‘You’re not allowed to die.’

  Cardinal Guzman shook his head as though with pity, and squeezed Cristobal so tightly that the hug made his small son pull a face.

  The creature in his lap squirmed and he looked down. But instead of seeing the beloved but forbidden fruit of his loins, he beheld the Obscene Ass wriggling there, with its coarsehaired ears, its enormous self-willed pudenda, its loathsome slavering tongue. It sneered up at the Cardinal, and in perfectly mocking mimicry of Cristobal’s reedy voice, said, ‘Give me another kiss, Papa.’

  Appalled and outraged, the Cardinal stood up so suddenly that the beast fell to the floor. Summoning courage and intent from deep within his disgust, he picked up the monster, grasped it tightly despite its howls, and flung it out of the open window. As he did so he felt a painful tugging on his finger, and when he looked at his hand he saw that his ring of office had somehow been thrown out with the demon.

  Cristobal hurtled through the air in what seemed to him to be an eternity of incomprehension and disbelief. He smacked into the turbid waters of the river with a blow that emptied his chest of air, and the gasp that wrenched his body drew in not air but the rank and slimy putrefaction of the waters, thick with the decay of the vanished children of the sewers. He drifted down ever more slowly, amazed and drowsy with the reverie of his gathering death, and briefly he brushed the hands that floated upward like weed, caressing him, and seeming forever to be reaching for the light, before he was taken up and carried away on the endless journey to the anonymous sea, still clutching in his hand the silver Christus Rex and his beloved protector’s ring.

  Cardinal Guzman turned away from the window, still gazing at the place where his ring once used to be, and beheld the Obscene Ass laughing at him from the armchair. He turned to the window, yelled, ‘Cristobal, Cristobal!’ took his head in his hands, and groaned as if all the grief of the world were his. He thought of diving after his son in the attempt to save him; but rationality asserted itself, and the thought struck him all at once that he had no way of knowing what had really happened. Perhaps he really had just ejected a demon that had simply re-entered. Perhaps all along the demon had been playing at being Cristobal. He went out into the barren stone of the corridors to search for him.

  He went to the boy’s room and found the bed empty. Cheerful toys in jaunty colours were scattered in disarray about the floor, and on the wall was the picture of Our Lord with his Bleeding Heart, competing for attention with pictures of football stars that Concepcion had indulgently cut from magazines. His pace quickening, Cardinal Guzman searched through the palace in all of the boy’s favourite hideyholes and crannies, the same places that he could always be found during games of hide-and-seek. He went out into the courtyard where Cristobal liked to watch the hummingbirds and imitate them, his arms flurrying as he ran about exclaiming, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’

  With a dreadful certainty rising in his breast, the Cardinal ran back to his study, placed a chair against the window, and looked down into the waters of the river. He saw nothing but the broken reflection of the reddened moon and of the sodium streetlamps. He stepped back down, mopped the sweat from his brow, and caught sight of the small toy dog with which his son had entered.

  Stupefied, numbed by self-hatred and contempt, desperate with remorse, he burst out of the room and ran for Concepcion’s chamber. He threw open the door and flung himself to his knees. Caught in the middle of folding a dress and putting it in a drawer, she stood dismayed at this apparition of agony and repentance. With tears following each other down his cheeks, his voice breaking, he held up a quivering hand and looked at her imploringly.

  ‘Christ have mercy on us,’ he said. ‘I think I have murdered Cristobal.’

  A shaft of excruciating pain wrenched in his gut, he drew a sharp breath, toppled forward on his face, and lay still.

  Part Two

  ‘It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind’s eye closed.’

  John Stuart Mill

  35 In Which The Presidential Couple Enjoy The Delights Of Paris

  HIS EXCELLENCY PRESIDENT Veracruz skimmed through the dispatches forwarded from the Embassy, and felt himself notably free of homesickness. There had been an assassination attempt upon General Hernando Montes Sosa, which was being kept secret until the various branches of the internal security services had decided who had perepetrated it. The Service of State Information thought that it was the Communists, the Army Internal Security Service claimed that it was an admiral who wanted to be Chief-of-Staff in the victim’s place, the Naval Internal Intelligence Agency said that it was a commodore from the Air Force, the Air Force Internal Security Agency thought that it was a disaffected army general, the Chief of Federal Police was convinced that it was a right-wing plot to blame the Communists and thus cause a backlash to their own benefit, the Chief of Provincial Police thought it had been done by a mere seeker of notoriety, the Chief of the National Gendarmerie believed that it was done by a lunatic, the Chief of City Police thought that it was the work of the CIA, the Foreign Ministry believed that it was part of an international conspiracy by MOSSAD, the Interior Ministry Internal Security Office thought that it was the KGB, the Ministry of Labour Surveillance Directorate blamed the Paraguayans because the General had clamped down on sources of cocaine coming in from that country, and the State Oil Company Industrial Security Operative had arrived at the conclusion that it was part of a wider plot by Muslim extremists and Mormons who wished to legalise polygamy. His Excellence noted that General Sosa was alive and well, and filed all the reports in the rubbish bin, his own opinion being that it was the work of the coca cartels. It was with greater interest that he read a letter from the French Ambassador, recommending spanking as an aphrodisiac, since it caused vasodilation in the appropriate regions of the body in both sexes; His Excellency pondered upon this, and then recollected that it had been he himself who had originally advocated this practise to the French Ambassador. He turned to a letter from the Finance Minister, Emperador Ignacio Coriolano, saying that the National Debt was now at precisely the staggering figure that it had been at the end of Dr Badajoz’ ‘economic miracle’. Emperador stated that
he was working with Foreign Secretary Lopez Garcilaso in the attempt to obtain fiscal advice from the Archangel Gabriel, and that the further missions to establish the whereabouts of El Dorado had discovered a cache of rusty muskets in a cave where they had been deposited in 1752 during an abortive rebellion. They had been sold to a Yanqui museum, and had raised half a million dollars which had somehow disappeared inside the international banking system. Emperador added, on a personal note, that he had bought a small aeroplane and was learning to fly.

  His Excellency turned to a letter from the College of Heraldry (Baltimore), pursuant to his desire to adopt a suitable ‘achievement’ for his own use, and found himself intellectually entombed beneath an avalanche of quaint jargon; ‘Erminois?’ he muttered, ‘A bouche . . . sable . . . mantling? Nebuly or invected? Fusilly, escartelly? Dieu et Ma Femme? Lioncels addorsed? Jaguars rampant regardant? Saracens salient?’ He snorted with impatience and wrote the college a note which said, ‘Just send me some pictures.’

  His Excellency was not in a good mood. His special gringo device for ensuring automatic erections had taken much of the pleasure out of his life because, now that he could pump it up at any time in order to gratify Madame Veracruz, she made him do it even when he did not truly wish it. He would lie on his back watching her gyrations and her truly extraordinary and disconcerting facial expressions, and find his attention wandering. He made cracks in the ceiling into maps of mountains and roads. He fantasised about reuniting the countries of northern South America into Gran Colombia. He composed glowing obituaries for himself. He reminisced about his student days and his first dose of clap. He solved the National Debt by blackmailing the president of the United States and drilling all the way through the world into the Siberian oilfields. He recited in his imagination all the nationalist poetry he had learned by heart at school, and all the indecent playground rhymes afterwards. He wished he could read a book, and felt himself growing sore.

  His Excellency’s spirit was flagging. The thought of leaving the capitals of Europe behind him in order to return to the perplexities and prevarications of office rendered him deeply depressed, and he wondered whether it might not be possible to continue to rule from abroad. He read the letter from Cardinal Guzman accusing him of raising by black art the demons that tormented him, and he sighed. He read the letter from ‘Eva Perón’, saying that there were religious fanatics loose in the countryside, and he shook his head with despair at the same time as reminding himself that he must one of these days get around to giving permission for the Armed Forces to suppress them. Just now he would costume himself as Odin, and await Madame Veracruz, who would shortly be appearing as Freya, complete with her necklace of Brisingamen, her cloak of flight, and her horned helmet which was regrettably too large for her and tipped forward over her eyes at the moment of orgasm, just as had the headdress of Isis during their Egyptian period.

  ‘Hello, Daddykins,’ she exclaimed as she opened the door dramatically and revealed herself in all her Nordic raiment. ‘Who are you today?’ She looked him up and down and added, ‘Not Odin again?’

  ‘Yes, my little Pussycat, Odin again.’

  Madame Veracruz had researched Freya thoroughly, discovering that that goddess was remarkably promiscuous, and so she had arranged for her husband to be sometimes her incestuous brother, Freyr, or one of the four dwarfs with whom she had slept in order to procure the necklace. ‘I thought you could be Loki today, Daddykins, and play some naughty tricks on me.’ She skipped forward daintily and kissed him coquettishly on the end of the nose. ‘Look,’ she exclaimed, opening her cloak of flight to reveal a freshly trimmed delta of Venus and a leather brassière with holes for the nipples. She performed a pirouette which swept the ashtray from the table, and fell theatrically upon the floor, holding out her arms to him. ‘Go on, pump it up. What are we visualising today?’

  ‘It will have to be the National Debt. Ever since we started concentrating on immortality the debt has been rising again.’

  She pouted and said, ‘But the National Debt is a big bore, Daddykins. Why don’t we concentrate on our little daughter becoming a human being? And afterwards we can go to the Pompidou Centre and the Rodin Museum.’

  ‘It must be the National Debt, Pussycat,’ he replied, and he adjusted his eyepatch, pulled his floppy hat low over his face, and, with an extreme sense of apathy, reached into his cloak to pump himself up.

  36 Dionisio Receives Sad News

  DIONISIO VIVO WAS sitting in his bookshop, studiously composing another of his celebrated musical palindromes. His head felt very cold where his mother had sheared away his hair, and he stopped frequently to scratch the scars upon his neck, which were itching in an ominous manner. Leticia Aragon always said, ‘Whenever the scar of the rope itches, I expect good news, and when the six-centimetre gash itches as well, then I expect bad news,’ and it seemed to be true that it always worked out in just that fashion.

  Pedro the Hunter knocked at the door and entered with his milling pack of silent dogs, so that Dionisio’s two jaguars felt obliged to leave the room in disgust.

  ‘Hola, Pedro, have you come to take a copa with me? Sit down.’ Dionisio pushed a chair in his direction with one foot, and Pedro made a gesture of polite refusal. ‘Forgive me, cabrón, but these stacks of books make my mouth go dry and my palms sweat. Just imagine all the hours spent with a pen that could have been spent fishing or tracking a puma.’

  ‘Puma skins rot,’ observed Dionisio, ‘but a book might last forever.’

  ‘Not everything that endures is good,’ riposted Pedro. ‘Look, I was in Ipasueño, and someone gave me this letter to give to you.’

  Dionisio took the proferred envelope and noticed that it was addressed simply to ‘Dionisio Vivo, in Cochadebajo de los Gatos’. It was covered with grimy fingerprints and bore no stamp. ‘I think it was given to you by a mechanic,’ he said.

  Pedro left, and Dionisio opened the letter to find that it was from Agustin, the policeman who used to collect the dead bodies from his garden in the company of Ramon.

  Respected Friend,

  I do not know whether this will ever reach you in the absence of a postal service, but my experience has always been that a letter dropped in the street will sooner or later be picked up and passed from one to another until finally it arrives at its destination.

  I thought that you would like to know that two days ago Velvet Luisa unexpectedly died of a sudden and very high fever. She was about to give up whoring and was going to come and stay with you before taking up employment at the alcaldia. But this, as you see, was pre-empted by misfortune.

  I know that you were very fond of each other, and I put my arm around your shoulder even from such a great distance in order to express my sympathy for your sadness. At times like this I am filled with wistfulness because I know that in a country like France or Holland she would have been cured and still amongst us.

  Your good friend, Agustin.

  Dionisio read the letter twice, folded the paper in his fingers, and was filled with the sense of being an improbable survivor. He thought of Velvet Luisa’s vibrant smile, her pointed breasts, the immaculate black silk that was her skin, and tried to imagine all that life shrinking and mummifying beneath the stones of Ipasueño cemetery. He thought of how she had been betrayed by her sister, of how one is so often a victim of circumstance, and his mind returned to the impossible image of Luisa as a corpse. He decided to go to see Profesor Luis.

  Farides was in the kitchen as usual, and as usual Profesor Luis was standing in its doorway feeling guilty about her unshared labours. She smiled brightly at Dionisio as he came in, and Luis grinned sheepishly and raised a hand in greeting. Dionisio handed him the letter and asked, ‘What do you make of this?’

  Profesor Luis read the letter and reflected a moment. ‘I think that it tells us to make the most of each other whilst we are here, because life is cheap and death arrives too soon.’

  Dionisio nodded. ‘Exactly. All my friends kee
p dying. And because of that, I am going now to find Leticia, to see what colour her eyes are today, and I am going to memorise it.’

  As Dionisio departed, Profesor Luis turned to Farides and said, ‘You had better take advantage of my offers of assistance, because when I am gone there will be no one even to stand in the doorway.’

  Farides grimaced and handed him a guinea pig. ‘Go outside and skin that, then.’

  He took the limp rodent and commented, ‘There must be some more pleasant task with which to evidence your love.’

  ‘There is,’ she replied. ‘When you have done that you can empty the bucket in the excusado for once.’

  37 Dr Tebas De Tapabalazo

  TERTULIANO TOMÁS KAISER Wilhelm Tebas de Tapabalazo, a man who had travelled life apparently unburdened by the idiosyncrasy of his name, had spent his years as the foremost surgeon to the wealthy and the influential leading a double life. There was nothing he did not know about the afflictions of the affluent; he knew about the bloat and tenacious constipation of those who eat nothing but expensive cuts of meat and frivolous soufflés. He was fully equipped to deal with the imaginary gynaecological problems of aristocratic women who marry for money and influence, but who baulk at the fulfilment of marital rites. He could detect at one hundred metres the indiscreet and democratic onset of the clap, and would sensitively diagnose it as ‘an unspecific melisma’, in the satisfying knowledge that none of his patients would have heard of such a technical term for a melodic embellishment crammed with grace notes. He had mastered the art of palpating flesh that was interred deep beneath stupendous folds of fat, and he could visualise keenly the presence of portentous stalagmites of cholesterol in the arteries of unexercised hearts. He believed in the efficacy of pantagruelian quantities of garlic for purifying the blood, and in lofty and paternal intimidation as a specific against mental disorder and hypochondria. His solemn air, his mellifluous and tuba-like voice, his enormous face and cold hands, and the half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, inspired fanatical confidence and devotion amongst his coterie of plutocratic patients, who always declared that Doctor Tapabalazo was expensive, but worth every centavo.