The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  What they did not know was that Dr Tapabalazo was an improvident recycler of wealth. He lived in moderate style in the suburbs, amid a chaos of unreadable books. He loved old German volumes in gothic script, books from the East that were written in whirls and flourishes and were supposed to be perused backwards, books from China that were painted rather than written, books in Old Norse and Luxembourgish, and he collected them with an assiduity and dedication that were a testament to his lifelong belief and asseveration that everywhere in the world there were meanings and connotations that were utterly mysterious. He could spend happy hours flicking through his collection, adrift in a sea of speculation and wonder because of the simple miraculous fact that most of the world did not speak Castilian. Nothing impressed him more than to see a foreign film on television, in which dogs obeyed commands in German or French. He would shake his head in surprise that even animals could intelligently comprehend foreign tongues of which he personally understood not a single syllable.

  But the greater part of his very considerable earnings were spent on establishing and maintaining a string of clinics that stretched from the favelas of the capital to the remotest Indian villages of the sierra. His desk was covered with jotted notes that computed how many cases of leprosy could be arrested with the income from one case of overactive imagination treated with placebos and bottles of sugar syrup, how many cases of scabies or impetigo could be treated with the revenue from three prolapsed oligarchic wombs or four anti-distemper injections for the huge black jaguar that lived off Turkish delight, and which the President’s wife disconcertingly referred to as ‘my little daughter’. He calculated that the proceeds from operating on the Cardinal’s growth would bring in enough funds to supply a thousand impoverished young mothers with contraception for an entire year.

  When Cardinal Guzman was delivered to the hospital, vomiting and raving, his stomach cruelly distended, Dr Tapabalazo diagnosed cancer and paranoid delusions. The latter he proposed to treat later, with a course of severe criticism and acerbic remarks, and the former he would treat at once, but with little hope that his patient was not already riddled with secondary growths. He felt a glow of schadenfreude at having the Cardinal at his mercy, because he had been educated in a convent, and consequently was now a leading figure in the National Secular Society.

  With his brow knitted and his spectacles in peril of sliding off the end of his nose, he placed his cooling hands on the Cardinal’s belly, and closed his mind to all but the impressions that he received from his practised fingertips. The stomach was tighter than a snaredrum, and he had the intuition that much of what lay therein was liquid. But a determined poke above the navel revealed that there was something solid and amorphous in there also. He inspected the thin face, the bony legs, the unpadded ribs, and knew without asking that for some time Cardinal Guzman had been unable to keep down his food. The afflicted man opened his eyes and jerked his body. ‘I murdered Cristobal,’ he said.

  ‘Be quiet,’ said the doctor sternly. ‘You have all but managed to murder yourself. You should have had this treated months ago, when it first started. Did you think that God was going to make it better on His own?’

  The Cardinal’s eyes flickered and closed. ‘It was my punishment.’ A trickle of saliva meandered out of the corner of his mouth and found its way down to the pillow.

  ‘I am going to do a laparotomy so that I can do a laparoscopy,’ announced Dr Tapabalazo, relishing the inscrutability of his terminology, ‘which means that I am going to cut you open and have a look. When I have sewn you up again and had a good think about it, I am going to cut you open again and put everything right. I would like to warn you that any of my patients who die are charged double, since the process of probate ensures that their capital becomes liquid.’

  ‘You should let me die,’ murmured the Cardinal.

  ‘Between you and me, I feel very much inclined to,’ jested the doctor, ‘but it would be most unprofessional. Now, I am going to allow you very few visitors, so perhaps you will be so good as to tell me which ones you particularly want to see.’

  ‘Concepcion,’ whispered Cardinal Guzman, ‘my cook. No one else.’

  ‘Concepcion,’ noted the doctor in his looseleaf book, remembering the lachrymose Negro woman who wore cardboard lavatory-roll liners in her hair in order to simulate Caucasian curls, who had knocked at the door of his office, and, her lips trembling, had asked him how her ‘cadenay’ was. He remembered his surprise when he had looked up this word in his dialect dictionary, and discovered that it was Quechua argot for ‘spouse’. ‘The dirty old hypocrite,’ he had thought, reacting with the automatic prurience of secularists who have discovered clerical lapses and pecadillos.

  Dr Tertuliano Tapabalazo rang for the anaesthetist, ordered his juniors to ready the operating theatre for a laparoscopy, and, whilst he robed himself in his surgical gown, made an invigorating cup of coffee with the aid of a bunsen burner, a tripod, and a fireproof conical flask. He drank the scalding brew in contemplative sips, thought about what he might find in the Cardinal’s belly, and strode off down the corridor to see if his fears were to be confirmed.

  38 Of The New Albigensian Crusade

  IN ALL TIMES and all places the principal attraction of religions has lain in their licence to do evil; that this is so is amply demonstrated by the fact that as soon as a faith loses its militant aggressiveness, the number of its followers diminishes. A man who does evil in God’s name and purportedly by His command becomes instantly justified, and the greater the evil he perpetrates, the more holy does he seem to himself. In the holy books of the world may be found precedents and even injunctions to delight the heart of the Devil, and both sides of any dispute find ample fuel for their fires within the mazes of contradiction that can be found therein. No proverb is more depressingly true than that which states that evil always pays good the compliment of masquerading as it.

  Mgr Rechin Anquilar felt in his own heart that blaze of righteous anger and intellectual clarity that stems from the absolute conviction that God speaks and acts through oneself. In addition, the success of his early exploits served to increase his belief in himself far beyond the bounds of rational self-confidence, until he presumed himself to be upon such terms of intimacy with God that he ceased even to feel the necessity of prayer before deciding his courses of action. It was as though the Deity Himself were permanently perched upon his shoulder, whispering instructions into his ear that displaced the processes of thought and banished from his heart the mitigating modesties of compassion and uncertainty.

  When he was a little boy, precocious, priggish, reluctant to share his sweets or lend out his catapult, slow to fight on account of cowardice rather than principle, Rechin Anquilar had escaped the vigorous beatings of the priests at school, and instead had become the victim of his fellows. He suffered from weak nasal bloodvessels, and it was a popular sport to whirl him by his feet in a vertiginous circle until the blood started from his nose and sprayed about in crimson droplets. He even learned to gain a kind of precarious popularity by cravenly volunteering for this treatment. Like all victims he turned upon those weaker than himself; he would tear off the wings and legs of butterflies. He once took the family cat and tossed it from a balcony, his heart thumping with guilty excitement, and was torn between relief and disappointment when the animal landed nonchalantly and sauntered away into the bushes. Once he nailed a lizard to a board and focused upon it his magnifying glass. Beneath the point of light that was the distillation of the tropical sun he watched the creature twist and writhe. The green flesh yellowed and began to smoke. Holding his nose against the reek of charring flesh, but his eyes wide with fascination, he witnessed the torment of the reptile. To his horror, it opened its mouth and shrieked. He had always believed that lizards were dumb, and this agonised vocalisation seemed to reveal all at once the animal’s sentience and his own cruelty. He released it into the paraguatan bushes, and, instead of praying for its recovery, he fell upon his knee
s and prayed forgiveness for himself. He learned from one of the fathers at school that animals have no souls, however, and thereafter there was no dog or bird safe from his catapult. During the years of his priesthood he had discovered a similar pleasure in the humiliation of those who suffered his barbed and acerbic reproaches in the intimacy of the confessional; he was notorious for the severity of his penances, and became popular with those soured and vexatious women who in early middle age become spiritual masochists.

  Mgr Rechin Anquilar had formed a formidable aquaintance with the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, being particularly cognisant of those sections which today are discreetly left out of all the anthologies, amongst them being the arguments in favour of the extirpation of heretics and heresy. He knew that to burn a heretic was an act of love, since this spared the victim the flames of hell hereafter, and he was one of the few Catholic historians who neither glossed over the activities of the Dominican Inquisition nor experienced a civilised retrospective shame on its account. This is perhaps why the new crusade recapitulated with such aberrant precision the atrocities of the original Albigensian crusade which destroyed the Cathar faith and the culture of the troubadours in Occitan France; perhaps it is coincidental that it also recapitulated yet one more time the ferocious destructiveness of the centuries-old struggles between Catholic Conservatives and secular Liberals. Mgr Anquilar brought back La Violencia.

  Perhaps what was most surprising about the New Albigensian Crusade was that it had not happened a hundred times already. This was a land divided between the followers of Santander, San Martin, Bolivar, Marx, Chairman Mao, Trotsky, Mariategui, the Roman Church, the would-be gringos, the Iberian nostalgies, all of them in their disparity sharing wholeheartedly in the Great Fivefold National Delusion. The first of these is that there are solutions to all the problems. The second is that only a strong centre can solve the problems. The third is that the strong centre must embody one’s own views exclusively. The fourth Great Delusion is that heroic surgery is required, and the fifth, that the Heroic Surgeons must be oneself and one’s cronies, armed with scalpels as big as machetes and amputation saws that run on gasoline and are designed for felling sequoias.

  Central to the national mythology was the idea that the great historical struggles were simple conflicts of good and evil. Leftists, for example, excoriated the conquistadors and canonised the Incas, while for rightists it was obvious that the conquistadors were bringing civilisation to barbarians. To any informed outsider it was perfectly evident that both sides consisted of no one but cynical opportunists, and that this was largely true of all the other conflicts as well.

  Mgr Rechin Anquilar, his missionaries, and the vast band of opportunists who called themselves ‘crusaders’, gathered together over a period of two weeks amongst the deserted classical ruins of the aborted Incarama Park, displacing the overflow of slum-dwellers and the colonies of wild animals, and confusing the gaunt and diseased fugitives of the cocaine wars who had set up bivouacs amongst the creepers, cracking the portentous stones with their cooking fires.

  The demi-constructed replicas of the world’s greatest monuments now resounded with coarse laughter and priestly incantations. The smell of roasting meat mingled with the aroma of olibanum and dittany of Crete, and the measured tread of sandals was drowned out by the methodical tramping of crusaders being drilled by ex-corporals into some semblance of discipline and cohesion. At this time they were still being referred to as the ‘bodyguard’, and not yet as ‘the troops’. The capital’s whores came out by the lorry-load to take advantage of the assembly of deracinated men, so that at night the encampments echoed unnervingly to the moans of purchased ecstasy, the shrieks of dissembled orgasm, the disputes about payment, and the dull thuds and muttered curses of customers fighting between themselves.

  The clergymen, appalled by the sacrilegious intervention of mercenary carnality, at first sent the whores away amid thunderous and righteous storms of denunciation, but the resourceful ladies would merely creep around the encampment to re-enter it at a point of safety. They developed winning smiles, and when caught would say ‘I am looking for my brother,’ or ‘Have you seen my fiancé?’ Some even cobbled together garments that in the dark made them appear to be nuns, so that very soon the genuine nuns had to leave for fear of the frequent requests for ‘French polishing’, ‘Mexican one hundred and eight centimetre fantasy massages’, and ‘Bolivian discipline’. The scandalised nuns at first appealed to Mgr Anquilar to temper the spirit of his bodyguard and prevent them from grabbing their breasts suddenly from behind, engulfing them in clouds of liquorish halitosis, and offering them a ‘free one’, or a ‘pearl necklace’. But the self-styled ‘legate’ had no estimation of women of any variety, and his response was to deliver homilies, his most preferred being that, ‘In God’s work one must expect to suffer.’ He was relieved when the nuns departed, and contemptuously tolerated the presence of the whores on the grounds that the moral imperfections of his men should not be an obstacle to the greater purpose of protecting his priests whilst they went about the divine labour of bringing salvation to the ignorant and the errant. When he caught his men with a whore, he would frown disdainfully, and admonish them to be truthful in the confessional and to be mindful of their souls. As the crusade cut its way through the countryside, the bedraggled camp followers became a fixture that even the priests learned to ignore.

  One evening at the end of the second week, when Mgr Anquilar was sure that all his missionaries had assembled, along with their protectors, he sent messengers to announce that all should gather in the open space before the simulacrum of the Tower of Babel.

  The Monsignor climbed to the second floor of the tower, and gazed with satisfaction over the host. The blazing torches made the upturned faces of the crowd redden in their glow and flicker, and he felt a commander’s sense of pride and humility. Twice daily he had heard, as he sat in his accommodation in the gloomy and tenebrous reproduction of El Escorial, the majestic strains of psalms and hymns floating out over the picturesque ruins as his priests practised his army in their spiritual weapons training, and he felt himself scaffolded by the ancient warrior tradition of Joshua and David. No latter-day soldiers of Midian could withstand him. A chill of Holy Fire ran up his spine like the caress of an angel, and he raised his arms for silence so that he could speak:

  ‘Brothers, throughout our sacred land there is a plague. This plague is a plague of disbelief, of false belief that imperils the health of Church and State. Our innocent children are brought up without the light of the Lord upon them, so that they will be bereft of salvation on the Last Day. How can we think upon this without sorrow and anger? This plague, this black plague that ravages our country, this cancer capable of corrupting the whole people, this evil that must be destroyed by recourse to steel, this purulent disease; if it proves itself refractory to a cure, the hour of the lancet has arrived. We, my friends, in waging Holy War against Evil, are doctors to our nation. It occurs that in setting a bone, in cauterising a wound, a doctor will cause pain to a patient in order to secure a greater good. Such doctors are we. We have God’s sanction to be such doctors. Have we been supplied with provisions? No, but none of us starve, because we are divinely provided for. In poverty and obedience we set forth tomorrow in the morning, and the Lord will continue to provide for us as sign of His favour. Tonight we watch and pray. Tomorrow we march. The blessing of God be upon you all.’

  The bodyguard, who had listened to this harangue and had endured the daily hymns with undisguised boredom and indifference, departed to their quarters to continue their revelry. Some of the priests watched and prayed, and a deputation of outraged local citizenry went to see the Chief of City Police, to complain that nothing had been done about the blatant brigandage of the campers in the ruins of the Incarama Park. Houses had been ransacked and local shops looted by bands of ‘crusaders’ supplementing what the Lord had in fact omitted to provide. Three girls had been violated brutally, and an old man k
illed and robbed of fifty pesos. Three policemen arrived two days later, and found nothing but litter and the corpse of a prostitute.

  39 The Spectacular And Wonderful Tapabalazo Teratoma

  ‘GENTLEMEN,’ said Dr Tapabalazo, ‘fetch your umbrellas, for we may be in for a shower. Stand by with the sucker!’

  With a flourish that would have struck the ignorant as cavalier and downright dangerous, the doctor opened a short cut in the Cardinal’s abdomen, and a small cascade of slimy liquid erupted elegantly into the air and fell back down again. ‘An aroma fit for a perfumery,’ commented the doctor, as a rank and stagnant stench like that of marsh water invaded every corner of the operating theatre. ‘Hydrogen sulphide, methane, and general rot. How delightful. Now, where is our little vacuum cleaner?’

  As the loathsome slime was pumped out, Cardinal Guzman dreamed that his brother Salvador had just stopped sitting on him in the garden of their parental home and had gone off to throw sticks for the family dog. ‘It’s no good telling me dirty poems in Latin,’ he shouted after his brother, ‘because I don’t understand them,’ whereupon Salvador looked over his shoulder and announced crushingly, ‘You don’t understand anything. You’re so immature.’

  Dr Tapabalazo waggled the siphon about inside the cavity, listening for the gurgles that indicated that what was being taken up was mostly air. He cast an eye over the large jar that was rapidly filling, and remarked, ‘Just like snot with yellow bits and spots of blood! Most savoury. Think of the cooks who would give their lives to invent a sauce like that. A touch of salt, a pinch of chile, half a clove of garlic, a dessertspoon of cornflour. Perfectly delicious. An unpar-alleled accompaniment to delicately roasted veal!’