The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  He took her hand and squeezed it comfortingly. ‘Did you know that I had a nightmare that I had killed him myself?’

  ‘You told me just when you were falling on your face, but I knew it was an illusion, like the time you came in and said that the Devil had challenged you to a game of chess, and the pieces kept changing positions on their own.’

  ‘That will not happen any more,’ said the Cardinal. ‘It was caused by poison.’

  She put her hands to her mouth in shock, and exclaimed, ‘Who would do such a thing? You do not think it was my –’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted, ‘it was not your cooking, and I was not blaming you. The doctor says that it was caused by the monster inside me. Apparently it was dying from its own poison anyway, but it poisoned me in the process. He said it was like very extreme constipation, when the poisons that should be ejected are reabsorbed into the body, and it causes delusions and madness.’

  ‘What is this monster? Tell me about it so that I do not have to think of Cristobal.’

  He pursed his lips and tried to think of a way of explaining it to her that she would find accessible. ‘It was like a child that has been growing inside me since I was born. Perhaps it was even a twin that grew in the wrong place in my mother’s womb. But it was a hideous freak, with everything in the wrong place, and the doctor says that it was the worst one that has ever been seen. He has given it to the university, and as soon as I am well he is going to take me to see it.’

  ‘A child?’ repeated Concepcion. ‘And you a man? This is a miracle. How could you have been made pregnant like this? You have never . . .’ She tailed off, too ashamed to continue. But the terrible thought could not be suppressed. She looked up and asked firmly, ‘Have you been doing it with a man?’

  His Eminence laughed brightly for the first time in months. ‘Querida, I have not. It is just a miracle, a natural marvel, and it has happened in the past to other people.’

  ‘You should use this in your writing to prove that Mary was a virgin, against the unbelievers.’

  ‘I think it has to be the same sex as oneself,’ he said, ‘but otherwise that would have been a good idea.’

  She smiled contentedly. ‘You have never told me before that an idea of mine was good.’ Then her face clouded over, and crumpled into tears. An awful longing welled up in her, a gap appeared in her soul, and she asked, ‘What will we do to find Cristobal?’

  ‘I am going to resign,’ he said. ‘I have plenty of private money. We will blaspheme when we want to, believe whatever seems reasonable at the time, and we will try to be happy. We will go away together and search the entire world for Cristobal. Come, give me a hug.’

  She leaned down, put her arms about his neck, and laid her cheek against his. ‘My cadenay,’ she said, her tears flowing down over his face.

  So it was that three weeks later the Cardinal, dressed nowadays in layman’s clothes, along with Concepcion and Dr Tapabalazo, found himself amid the grisly medical collection of the university. Ouside the inexorable rain of the capital fell in its habitually noncommittal fashion, and in the courtyard outside, the students, dressed on account of an historical anomaly in military uniform, hurried to their lectures with the collars of their greatcoats turned up.

  In the glass jars filled with cloudy formalin there bobbed the right arm of a famous general, yellow colons perforated like colanders, varicoloured cancers the size of tennis balls, enormous hearts taken from Indians living at high altitudes, foetuses without mouths but with genitals shamelessly attached to their foreheads, embryos with two heads, livers transformed to sponges by cirrhosis, the forlorn results of miscarriages, and the head of a man who had lived normally for years with an arrow straight through the middle of his brain.

  ‘This is a metaphysical laboratory,’ said the doctor. ‘I have spent hours in here looking at all these exhibits, wondering how the universe must be in order for such things to exist.’

  Dominic Guzman inspected a grotesque creature in a large jar, and pondered aloud. ‘Nature’s experiments, the Devil’s miracles, or God’s indifference?’

  ‘Precisely, my dear Dominic. Look at the label.’

  Guzman bent forward and read, ‘“The Tapabalazo Teratoma”. This is mine?’

  ‘It is ours now, and no amount of bribery or persuasion would induce us to give it back, I can assure you. We had to give it a haircut so that one can see some of the detail.’

  ‘Is this your baby?’ asked Concepcion, her eyes popping with horror and amazement. She crossed herself three times and said the last sentence of the Hail Mary.

  What she beheld might at a distance have seemed to be a furry football that had gone out of shape. But a closer inspection would have revealed a sad and empty eye fixed motionlessly upon infinity. Concepcion saw that the iris was of the same colour as that of the Cardinal. A portion of thumb stuck at a careless angle out from behind it, and a nodule projected from near by, at the end of which there dangled a tiny and useless foot. ‘It was going to be a boy,’ she said, pointing at the long pink penis that dangled from one side.

  ‘It had a testicle inside, at the back,’ said the doctor. ‘We dissected the poor monster and removed the inside. Then we filled it again and mounted it like this. We found every kind of normal tissue, but all in the wrong places. Did Dominic tell you? We tried to keep it alive, but there was nowhere to attach the equipment to it. It actually had some signs of adaptation, with membranes growing around individual parts to protect them, but really there was no way to prolong its existence. When I look at this awful and pathetic thing, it makes me feel very sad. I feel a kind of acute compassion.’

  ‘I always feel sorry for monsters,’ said Concepcion. ‘Even in fairy stories where the monster is bad and gets killed at the end, I always feel sad and I wonder if there was not another way. Did you keep any of the hair that you cut away?’

  ‘Certainly I did. One can tell a lot from hair.’

  ‘I would like some,’ she said. ‘When one loses a child, one should always have something to remember it by.’

  Without questioning, Dr Tapabalazo went to a drawer and took out a folded plastic bag. ‘Have all of it,’ he said, ‘since you have a good heart.’

  Concepcion opened the bag and put in her hand. She felt the locks of hair between her fingers, lifted some out and scrutinised it carefully. She looked up and smiled at Dominic Guzman. ‘I can tell it was yours. It even has grey in it and it feels the same. I shall keep it forever.’

  They stood in silence looking at the misbegotten victim in the glass jar, and suddenly Dominic Guzman said, ‘We should give it a name. I do not think that “Tapabalazo Teratoma” is a very sympathetic name.’

  The doctor nodded. ‘I am afraid that the students have already christened it “Attila the Hun”, although for a while there was a fashion for calling it after different politicians.’

  ‘It should be called “Dominic”,’ said the Cardinal, whose unspoken and melancholy line of reasoning was that he himself was the monster, and therefore it should be named after him. ‘How the mighty are fallen,’ he added.

  Dr Tapabalazo, sensing his mood, put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘My dear Dominic, climbing down from an irksome pedestal is not the same thing as falling.’

  At the palace the couple continued the business of packing up their possessions. Dominic Guzman sorted out the remaining administrative problems with his secretary, sent several Hebrew volumes to Dr Tapabalazo in token of gratitude, and steadfastly refused interviews with the hordes of hopeful pressmen who had gathered like vultures outside in the rain, their taste-buds tingling for the juice of scandal. In the newspapers he read accounts and retrospective assessments of his cardinalate with the strange sensation that none of it had anything to do with him, and he read articles about the growing public scandal of the bodies of children that turned up in the river. He and Concepcion suspected that somehow Cristobal had got out of the palace and been mistaken for one of the children of the sewers,
but at the same time they maintained a persistent optimism that he was alive and that they would find him. They would talk about him for hours, each sentence beginning with, ‘Do you remember how Cristobal . . .?’ and Concepcion gathered together his favourite toys so that she could give them to him to play with when he was found. In bed they would lie in each other’s arms reminiscing about his sweet smell, his obsession with bodily functions and excretions, his alarmingly direct logic, his honey-brown skin and his huge dark eyes.

  On the morning that they were to leave the palace in their new Brazilian jeep, Dominic Guzman looked into the mirror at himself and saw a man in the prime of his life, disturbed but not defeated by grief. He inspected the scar on his stomach, still livid, and noticed that he was even growing a little fat. He looked around the room and saw no sign of the Obscene Ass, the Litigator, the Contending Heads, or any other of the diabolical rout that had tormented him for so long. He went to the door for the last time and was about to close it behind him, when he heard a tapping sound. Intrigued, he went back into the room and looked around. The tapping came more urgently, from his left. He looked up and saw that at the window above the river there was a small bird hovering. They looked at each other in silence, and the bird tapped once more, as if with greater insistence.

  He opened the window, not knowing what else to do, and the tiny and exquisite hummingbird darted inside. It seemed to be showing off. It flew backwards, upwards, sideways, looped in a graceful circle, shot across the room as though discharged from a pistol, and then, without turning around, shot back again. It settled on Guzman’s hand and preened itself busily. He saw that it was a living sunbeam of iridescent colours; it was emerald and lilac, azure and cerulean, scarlet and viridian. He held it up to the light, and the feathers refracted through every colour of the spectrum. He held it, so rapt with its jewelled beauty that a choke arose in his throat. He took it back to the window and said, ‘Little bird, you had better go.’

  But the minuscule creature gripped tightly on his forefinger and would not be budged. When he tried to nudge it off with his other hand, it pecked him imperiously, squeaked defiantly, and sidled closer to him. ‘O . . . well,’ he said, and took it along to show to Concepcion. He raised his hand and said, ‘We have been adopted.’

  She looked at it wonderingly, and it performed an identical aerobatic display for her benefit before settling back on Guzman’s finger. ‘It won’t go away,’ he said.

  ‘I will go and make it some sugar syrup,’ she decided, forever practical and nurturing. ‘It can drink from a cigar tube.’ As she left the room she turned and said over her shoulder, ‘Cristobal would have loved that.’

  43 An Apocalypse Of Embarrassment Strikes The City (2)

  DOWN ON THE plateau the little party admired the citrus groves, the rice field, the guavas, yuccas, mangos, papaya, the splendidly enormous avocados, the irrigation ditches, the stewponds, the bridge across the river, and were just passing the platano plantation when they heard the sound of a violent struggle and someone being murdered amongst the bananas.

  ‘Ay, take that,’ they heard, followed by the sound of a wet slap.

  ‘You bastard, ah, don’t do that, oh.’

  ‘No, no, no, ay, ay, ay.’

  The members of the party exchanged glances, and Hectoro, anxious to prove to the Briton that here there was no shortage of machismo despite their Argentinian cousins’ defeat in the Malvinas war, slipped silently off his horse, pulled his revolver, and crept through the luxuriant growth towards the scene of the brutality.

  The dreadful shrieks and yelps continued until Hectoro surprised everybody by emerging with the ghost of a smile upon his lips. He removed the puro from his mouth, and whispered, ‘You will have to help me, I cannot cope with such barbarism on my own.’

  The General removed his automatic from his holster, Profesor Luis unsheathed his machete, and the British Ambassador reflected with a sinking sensation in his stomach that he was about to experience at first hand the legendary violence of this land. They followed Hectoro back into the green, rubbery verdure of the banana grasses.

  After only a few metres of creeping Hectoro put his finger to his lips and pointed, and the party spread a little in order to peer between the greenery.

  Doña Constanza, lapsed oligarch, and her lover Gonzago, lapsed guerrilla, had decided to take advantage of the occasion on the heights above in order to descend upon one of the smaller machines and cavort in private in the deserted paradise of the plateau. What the party witnessed was the two of them copulating ecstatically in an unfeasible position at the same time as splattering and smearing each other with a steadily diminishing pile of fruit. Gonzago was at this very moment licking the seeds of a grenadillo from her shoulder whilst, in between pelvic rotations, she was cramming a banana into his armpit.

  Hectoro watched the lascivious display with undisguised enjoyment; the General watched it with a kind of detached amazement; Profesor Luis watched it with a horror of speculation as to what the British Ambassador must be thinking, and the latter was so overwhelmed with stupefaction that he failed to notice a deadly fer de lance drop onto his back and slither away.

  Hectoro, being a campesino, was unable to enjoy such a splendid spectacle without some degree of participation; when the two lovers juddered to the end of their salacious earthquake and descended sideways to the ground, he leapt up crying, ‘Whooba,’ whipped his sombrero from his head, and waved it in appreciation. ‘Mas, mas,’ he shouted, ‘queremos mas.’

  Dõna Constanza and Gonzago started with comic surprise, looked up at the row of eyes peeking through the foliage, saw Hectoro jumping up and down waving his hat, and Dõna Constanza shrieked, leapt up, and disappeared into the plantation, leaving a trail of squashed fruit that had slid off her body. Gonzago stood up hesitantly, covered his nether parts with his hands, and bowed sheepishly. He grinned from ear to ear, looked around for an escape route, and disappeared in the same direction as his lover.

  ‘Magnifico,’ exclaimed Hectoro.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Profesor Luis to the Ambassador.

  The General holstered his weapon, pulled a handkerchief to wipe his forehead, and the Ambassador noticed that the knees of his suit were symmetrically grey and wet where he had been kneeling in the clay.

  Back at the top of the cliff the General attempted to revive the dignity of the occasion by personally thanking whoever it was who had solved the problem with the lift, but found himself frustrated because Dionisio had strenuously begged Remedios not to allow the Conde anywhere near his descendant. He was anxious to avoid lengthy and unbelievable explanations.

  But the Conde was not to be so restrained; he shook off Remedios’ firm grip on his arm and strode forward to introduce himself with a flourish as, ‘The Conde Xavier Pompeyo de Estremadura, at your service, and God preserve His Catholic Majesty.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ observed the General, assessing sceptically the anachronistic individual by whom he was confronted. The Conde was attired in the rusted remains of a half-suit of armour buckled over an Indian garment that puckered and bulged out of it at odd places. The cuirass was pierced with the holes torn by the bullets of Remedios’ Kalashnikov, and on his head he wore a burgonet helmet, the rivets of whose peak were lamentably loose. It suddenly occurred to the General that numerous other men were also clad in scraps of ancient armour, and he blinked and shook his head.

  ‘I have an ancestor of that name,’ said the General, ‘who disappeared in 1533 on an expedition to locate the lost city of Vilcabamba, and who founded the town of Ipasueño.’

  ‘The very same,’ exclaimed the Conde, ‘and I claim from you your estate which is not yours until I have properly died.’

  The General grew ever more perplexed and the Conde added, ‘As your senior relative, it follows that you are obliged to yield before my authority, or I will slit your nose as I did with the Moor in Cordoba.’

  ‘We shall talk of this in private later,’ said the Gene
ral diplomatically, and he beckoned to his son, who had been trying to creep away. ‘Dionisio, come here and explain something to me.’

  No amount of explanation over lunch at Doña Flor’s could persuade the General that in fact that Conde really was the Conde, who had been buried beneath an avalanche of snow with fifty of his men on St Cecilia’s Day, and been brought back to life by Aurelio in time to help with the disinterment of the city. Dionisio held out his hand and indicated to his father the Montes Sosa ring. ‘He recognised his ring and demanded it back from me. Fortunately he only remembers things that happened several hundred years ago, and so he will forget that he was going to slit your nose. Remedios keeps him under control, I am pleased to say.’

  The British Ambassador, who understood none of this intense Castilian discourse, was trying to kick out at the small pigs that had gathered beneath his feet in the hope of scraps, until he suddenly realised that he had been mistaken to ask for the Chicken of a True Man. When the essence of chile sauce sank its fangs into the back of his throat he choked violently and an uncontrollable stream of saliva descended from the side of his mouth onto the tablecloth. The brilliant red flush that transformed his throat and face into something resembling a salamander’s was perhaps three-quarters Chicken of a True Man, and one-quarter shame at his appalling attack of lèse-majesté. Pop-eyed with pain, he picked up the water jug and drank its entire content at one gulp before realising that it contained aguardiente. Desperate at the onset of his inevitable inebriation, he broke out into a deluge of sweat. He managed to feed some scraps of his meal to the pigs, who ran out squealing, before his head descended slowly onto his plate and he slept like a baby with saliva still drooling into the remains of his meal. In his terrible stupor the urine ran down his leg into his wellington boots, and he dreamed of Dõna Constanza and Gonzago making love in a pool of vomit.