The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  The siphon was withdrawn and he clamped the wound apart with locking forceps. ‘Speculum, and plenty of light,’ he demanded, and his assistants adjusted the overhead lamp, whilst another of their number handed him the speculum.

  He bent over the recumbent body and gently inserted the instrument. He saw a thick mass of matted black hair. ‘Gentlemen, we have here something quite rare and marvellous, that I have seen before only in textbooks, and which is definitely not malignant.’ He invited them all to have a look, and one by one they inspected what appeared to be the kind of wig that is bought by Negresses to make it appear that their hair is straight.

  ‘How did that get in there?’ asked one of them, his eyebrows contorting with puzzlement above his surgical mask.

  ‘All will be revealed in the fullness of time,’ replied Tapabalazo, leaning again over the incision. He turned his scalpel so that the blade pointed upwards, and with the tip of the handle gently parted the hair.

  Despite his years of experience and his consummate expertise, he was unprepared for what he saw. He started in astonishment and stepped backwards. He bent forward once more and verified that there really was a large and vacant eye looking back at him unseeingly from behind the wiry strands. He raised his head and said triumphantly, ‘Gentlemen, we are truly privileged!’

  ‘It is a teratoma,’ the doctor informed the Cardinal later, ‘and we will have to operate again in order to remove it. Fortunately it is not a true cancer, and my prognostication is that you will live a long life in good health.’

  The Cardinal had awakened refreshed by the deep sleep and exhilarated by the oxygen of the revival mask. ‘Is that necessary? I feel marvellous, and my belly feels very much less tight.’

  ‘Of course it is necessary, my dear Cardinal. There is a very large growth in there, a growth of epic proportion, and I intend to pickle it in formaldehyde and present it to the university. It will be known as the “Tapabalazo Teratoma”, and you and I will be immortalised. I am most profoundly grateful to you for being in possession of such a magnificent hereditary flaw.’

  ‘Teratoma?’ mused the Cardinal, who knew his Greek. ‘Are you saying that it is some variety of monster?’

  ‘Your grasp of etymology is most admirable, Your Eminence. This is most literally a monster in the truest sense. From now on I will have no truck with metaphorical or mythic monsters; they would leave me heartrendingly dissatisfied.’ He looked down at the Cardinal through his half-moon spectacles, and smiled indulgently. ‘It appears that we have a wonderful specimen of a growth that has been burgeoning inside you since the day of your nativity. It consists of a randomly assembled chaos of normal bodily components that have proliferated in an unstructured manner from a totipotential germ. I hope to find bones and teeth, bits of muscle and urinary and intestinal tract, nervous tissue, cerebro-spinal material, an ear if I am lucky. Permit me to become carried away! I hope to find sebaceous glands, sudoriparous, apocrine and eccrine glands, I anticipate non-myelinated and myelinated nerves, complete with perfectly formed perineuriums, I hope for ganglia of all descriptions, and ependymal and ventricular cavities thoughtfully provided with choroid plexuses. Perhaps there will be a hand or a foot, and, best of all, genitalia. My dear Cardinal, I have already found a great deal of hair and an eye, but I regret that the entity has already begun to regress and decay. Your abdomen was full of desquamation and the results of excretory processes, and I believe that both you and your improbable progeny have been progressively poisoned by it. Think of it theologically,’ continued the doctor with an ironic glint in his eye, ‘I am about to repeat the miracle of virgin birth, albeit by caesarian section. Parthenogenesis! A true miracle!’

  The effects of this lengthy exposition on the Cardinal were not anything that the surgeon could have anticipated. The patient seemed to be utterly defeated, and appeared visibly to be entering the door that leads down the long corridor to death. ‘Did you say that this monster has nervous tissue? Brain tissue?’

  ‘That is nearly always the case. I believe that there is somewhere an example of a cerebellar cortex taken from a teratoma. One can find everything that one would normally expect to derive from an ectoblast, by which I mean that you can come across any feature of the human organism. It is as though one were to put an embryo into a mincer, and then grow it; it comes out with everything there, but arranged in the most haphazard manner. A real monster.’

  ‘I cannot allow you to operate to remove it.’

  ‘Good God, why not?’

  ‘If it has nervous tissue and brain tissue, then it may possess consciousness, and to remove it would be to kill it.’

  Dr Tapabalazo was both amused and horrified; ‘My dear Cardinal, I doubt very much if it has consciousness. Even if it did, one regularly kills and eats animals, which undoubtedly are conscious and sentient.’

  ‘We are talking of a human being, Doctor. We are talking of what amounts to abortion, which is murder. It were better to let me die with the creature within me, a natural death.’

  ‘But this creature has no organisation of its elements! It cannot be conscious. And furthermore, it is dying already, as I believe I told you. And more than that, it is quite unviable on its own. Once I have severed the pedicle that attaches it to you, it could not possibly live; if it has a heart, then that heart would not work. It is not a human being but an abhorrent parasite that will kill you if I leave it in place. I cannot possibly agree to leaving it where it is.’

  ‘How are you to know that it has no soul, Doctor? It is the soul that counts and not the arrangement of the brain. If it is dependent upon me for life, then it must be as God wills. I will agree neither to abortion nor euthanasia, as being contrary to the faith.’

  Dr Tapabalazo frowned and sighed with impatience. ‘In the first place, you have never been known before to practise your faith with such absurd extremism. In the second place, as your doctor, the ethical considerations lie with me and not with you. In the third place, Jesus Christ Himself permitted Himself to be taken and crucified in the full knowledge that this was about to occur, and therefore he committed suicide, which is also contrary to the faith. You will perceive, my dear Cardinal, that even the Lord Himself is prepared to make exceptions in matters of principle. I would add that if you do not allow me to operate, then you yourself are knowingly committing suicide in a cause that has no nobility to it whatsoever.’

  Cardinal Guzman lay silent and pale, his lips moving soundlessly, perhaps in prayer. He said softly, ‘I do not know anything anymore,’ and two tears trickled down his cheeks from the outward corners of his eyes. The doctor held his hand, regretting deeply that he had told his patient anything at all about his affliction, and wishing that at least he had been less brutal. ‘I should be kind even to cardinals,’ he thought, and then said, ‘I promise that after I have removed it I will try my best to keep it alive.’

  A deep sigh of despair and resignation escaped from Guzman’s lips, and he whispered, ‘For the love of God, Doctor, I am only trying for once to do as I should.’

  40 In Which The Monsignor Encounters One Or Two Difficulties

  THE CRUSADE PURSUED its meandering, slow, and cumbersome way across the department of Cesar. For most of the time it was a disorderly rout that resembled an aimless biblical exodus, and indeed many of the priests found themselves in possession of a new understanding as to how it had been possible for the children of Israel to spend forty years crossing the tiny parcel of land that separates Egypt and Canaan, a journey that should have taken a few weeks at most.

  It was not after all that Moses had been an incompetent mapreader or had not been able to discern his direction from the scintillation of the stars. It was not that the Divinity fell short in supplying that redoubtable patriarch with suitably prophetic navigational inspiration. It was not that the destination was simply unknown or undecided. It was not that the wheel had not yet been invented, necessitating the use of humans as pack animals. Nor was it due simply to a longstanding an
d disorientating amazement that the Egyptian army had been swallowed up by the Red Sea. It was not that the twelve tribes absorbed a phenomenal amount of time in worshipping the Golden Calf, or engaged in heated debate as to whether or not to return to the Pharaoh because of boredom on account of eating nothing but manna. It was due simply to the appalling difficulties that attend any attempt to move large numbers of people over a given distance whilst simultaneously keeping them supplied.

  It became very clear almost as soon as the crusade departed from the Incarama Park that everyone would have to move at the speed of the slowest, or else it would presently break up into numerous parties of stragglers, wanderers and premature arrivers. There were three old and unpredictable trucks carrying camping equipment and general provisions, and to begin with Mgr Anquilar would send them ahead to a predesignated spot where he intended that camp should be set up for the night. But the drivers were never very sure as to whether or not they had arrived, and would generally keep on driving until they reached a likely-looking spot that they believed to be within range of one day’s walk from the point of departure. In their estimates they were invariably optimistic, and after nightfall they would backtrack along their route until they met up with the crusaders, who were always in a cold fury on account of having been left with neither food nor shelter upon their arrival. One day Mgr Rechin Anquilar looked at his map and realised that he no longer had any idea where he was; coincidentally the truck drivers far ahead realised that they too were lost, and unanimously decided to keep driving until they found a buyer for their vehicles and the equipment therein, which explains why there is now in the region of Cesar a travelling circus which possesses numerous tents painted with crosses, and three elderly trucks which are still registered as property of the church, and whose road tax is still conscientiously paid on an annual basis by a bespectacled clerk lost forever in the labyrinth of the Byzantine ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

  ‘The Lord will provide,’ agreed the priests, and, of course, He did, mediated by the peasants who found their fruit trees stripped, their pigs stolen, their horses and mules borrowed in perpetuity, their maize miraculously harvested overnight, and their tractors driven away and abandoned at whatever place the Lord chose beneficently to cause them to run out of fuel. The footsore clergy marvelled at this self-renewing miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the bodyguard was unanimously struck by wonder at the ease with which it was possible to obtain anything whatsoever by outnumbering any potential opposition by ten to one or more. The undesirable elements in each community were likewise struck by this, and joined in the crusade in such numbers that the necessity for pillage was constantly multiplied. All the more appealing to such thugs and brigands was the belief, disseminated by the priests, that the crusade would mean plenary indulgence and would count in God’s eyes as equivalent to a pilgrimage. It would therefore be possible to commit any crime one liked, and still go straight to heaven faster than the flash of a machete on the day of one’s death. No one is more naively pious than a brigand, and it was especially satisfying for them to feel that one could give free rein to one’s baser instincts and yet be bathed in golden showers of divine favour nonetheless.

  Thus there began an inexorable winnowing process, whereby those of greater theological and ethical sophistication and sensitivity found themselves unable to abide the depredations and coarseness of their fellow crusaders. Within days a tidal wave of unrest and moral outrage overtook those who had joined the expedition out of a sense of religious idealism, and who had wished to share the personal happiness and peace that had descended upon them after having made the decision to live their lives in imitation of a God that they conceived to be compassionate and merciful. These people were the kind that one can find all over the world, sentimental, helpful, rather lacking in self-esteem, diffident, but involved in projects that can include anything from teaching literacy and agronomics to peasants, to going shopping on behalf of the infirm and the elderly on Wednesday afternoons. When they marry they often find that their children end up as Buddhists, Quakers, or Baha’ists, and they do not mind because they believe that many paths lead to the one God.

  Upon finding that the bodyguard was utterly impervious and even hostile to their docile reproofs, fending them off with bluff rejoinders that smacked unmistakeably of sarcasm and jest, these gentle people began to feel increasingly uneasy about being with the crusade at all. They formed deputations to Mgr Rechin Anquilar, and had the uncanny experience of hearing from his lips exactly the same kinds of remarks that they had received from the bodyguard, except that the Monsignor uttered them with chilling sincerity. Father Lorenzo was with one of these groups of the concerned, having discovered by eavesdropping upon the conversations of his bodyguard what was really going on, and he and several other priests and lay people approached the Monsignor deferentially one evening as he sat pensively upon his huge black horse, looking every inch the caudillo that in truth he was to become.

  The Monsignor, who had recently begun to refer to himself as ‘El Inocente’ in honour of the pope who had called the original Albigensian Crusade, listened impassively to their complaints of rapine and larceny, and replied:

  ‘Gentlemen, we are in the business of saving souls, and that is the most important thing, which should at all times be borne in mind. It has always been the case that many must suffer for the greater good. What does it matter if a pig is taken from its owner when that pig feeds those who are striving to save a thousand souls from the torments of the Pit? What does it matter if a woman suffers assault, when in the first place woman is responsible for the fall of mankind, and in the second place the immortal souls of a hundred other women may be brought before the gates of heaven? You tell me tales of murder, and yet apparently you have not considered that death is not a tragedy. We could kill everyone in the world, but no harm would come of it, for nothing happens unless God wills. You fail, senores, to see things sub specie aeternitatis.’

  Father Lorenzo summoned up his courage and looked up at the zealous eyes of his leader. ‘I and my fellows did not embark on this enterprise in order to increase the sum of human misery, we came to bring our fellow men to the knowledge of happiness in Christ, and –’

  ‘We are talking about eternal bliss, not the little joys and sorrows of our temporal state, Father, remember that. Now I am afraid that I have plans to make.’ He spurred his horse forward, leaving the company of the disillusioned to raise their hands in gestures of despair, shake their heads, and ask each other, ‘What now?’

  ‘We should go to the Cardinal,’ announced Lorenzo. ‘He would put a stop to all this if he knew.’

  ‘I have heard that he is very sick and all but mad,’ said another. ‘I know someone who works in the palace.’

  ‘In that case,’ replied the priest, ‘I shall go to the Monsignor and tell him that my conscience obliges me to return to the capital and inform the police of all that I have witnessed.’

  It was the most courageous thing that Father Lorenzo ever did, and also the last. The Monsignor was in no mood to have his celestial mission thwarted by the secular authorities, and with righteous anger he deputed one of his bodyguard to cause the troublesome priest to vanish off the face of the earth and reappear two metres beneath it. This was the first of his many judicial executions, and thereafter they became ever easier and more frequent.

  It was not long before everybody knew what had happened to Father Lorenzo, and the softhearted disappeared en masse, returning to their parishes to write urgent letters to the authorities. These letters were read with concern or disbelief, filed, and forgotten whilst more immediate administrative problems were attended to, and it was not until Dionisio Vivo himself exerted his considerable influence that anything was done at all.

  In the meantime El Inocente found himself beset by new problems caused by the left-wing faction in the body of men to which he had become accustomed to refer as ‘my army’.

  The Church, like most of those in Latin America
, found itself divided neatly across the middle. There was the hierarchy, consisting of the ultra-conservative sons of the oligarchy, who promoted each other assiduously and controlled the allocation and use of resources, and there was the main body of the general priesthood. There had been a time when this latter was employed and paid mostly by the rich landlords (the latifundistas), and their mission on earth had been to counsel the poor to put up with their ordained lot and await their reward in heaven.

  But ever since the Council of Medellin a great change had taken place, and nowadays the general priesthood overwhelmingly believed that to love one’s neighbour includes helping him and taking his side in the face of injustice and exploitation. Some priests, such as Camilo Torres, even went so far as to take up arms and join the Communist guerrilleros in their hopeless ‘focos’ in the countryside, and many others found themselves able to read and agree with almost everything they read in Fidel y La Religión, a book by Frei Betto which, owing to the solitude of that continent, sold millions in Latin America and was ignored everywhere else. The radical priests and nuns who were so susceptible to this book considered themselves to be the new voice crying in the wilderness, preparing for the second coming of the Lord in the form of socialism, and they did not find themselves seeing eye to eye with Mgr Rechin Anquilar. This latter had his gaze fixed upon the next world, and was principally interested in cramming as full as possible the kingdom of paradise, whereas the former were chiliasts who looked forward to the kingdom of heaven on earth, and conceived of Christ as somewhat resembling Fidel Castro in demeanour, but with the soft and gentle eyes of Che Guevara.