The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  There was in Cochadebajo de los Gatos a peña. Most towns have such a music club, and they consist of whatever musical instruments can be found or improvised, played ad libitum at competitive volumes in whatever key or tempo each player wishes to select. The result is a cross-weaving of rhythms and tunes, random noises and shameless mistakes, that dwarf anything conceived by Stockhausen and which would knock into a cocked hat the drivellings of the most egregiously pretentious avant-garde jazz ensemble. The purpose of these cheerful assemblies of sousaphones, cracked French horns, taped-up bugles, home-made bamboo whistles, guitars strung with electric flex, and accordions with nothing working but sharps and flats, was to create new, wondrous, and strident levels of cacophony, and so to increase the impression of utter chaos at fiestas.

  But the peña of Cochadebajo de los Gatos had been considerably tamed by the patient instruction of the Mexican musicologist, with the occasional help of Dionisio. The former had on this occasion been aided by Don Emmanuel, who had taught him some patriotic British songs, and also had instructed a choir of little children in the perfect pronunciation of the words.

  These diminutive children now stood to sing the national anthem of Great Britain. There were twenty serious little faces framed by mops of thick black hair, that of the girls having been pulled into the tightest of bunches that stood out practically at right-angles from the sides of their heads. They were dressed in their smartest red and black ponchos with tassels, and now and then a shy smile would indicate that most of them were awaiting their second growth of front teeth, which is why the British Ambassador noticed that they sang with a charming lisp.

  The band struck the first chord, faltered, and then regained itself. It launched not into ‘God Save The Queen’, but into the Eton Boating Song. Initially startled, the Ambassador then swelled with a pride like that of an old war horse at the call of a bugle. He began to sing along, but then, even in his altered state, he discovered that the words were unfamiliar. What he heard, sung breathily but in perfect tune by twenty seraphic little voices, was:

  ‘My name is Cyril,

  I live in Leicester Square,

  I wear pink pyjamas,

  And rosebuds in my hair.

  Oh we’re all poofs together,

  But nobody seems to care.

  Oh we’re all poofs together,

  Excuse us while we go upstairs.’

  A rapturous smile spread across Don Emmanuel’s face as he witnessed the Ambassador’s countenance betraying at first incomprehension and then outrage. The latter was still drunk enough to think that he could put things right by singing the correct words, and he waved his arms and sang, ‘We all pull together . . .’ so that the band, impressed by this display of patriotism, took up the tune whilst the children took up the refrain of Don Emmanuel’s amended version and drowned out the Ambassador entirely.

  ‘That is not the tune I remember,’ observed the General to his son. ‘Have they changed it?’

  Before Dionisio could reply, Don Emmanuel stood before the assembly in the courtyard of the Palace of the Lords and announced, ‘Our next little ditty is called “The British Grenadiers”, and we hope that you all enjoy it as much as the last one.’ He caught the Ambassador’s eye, winked, and turned as the band launched into the introductory bars under the baton of the Mexican. Once again Don Emmanuel had improved the composition of the lyrics:

  ‘Some die of drinking water

  And some of drinking beer;

  Some die of constipation,

  And some of diarrhoea.

  But of all the world’s diseases

  There’s none that can compare

  With the drip, drip, drip

  Of a syphilitic prick,

  And the sting of gonorrhoea.’

  The Ambassador sprang to his feet to protest, and everyone else arose also to join in with what they assumed was going to be a standing ovation. The Ambassador gazed hopelessly at the politely applauding crowd, and faintheartedly joined in. Nor was the ordeal over until he had been subjected to an exquisitely harmonised twenty-four-stanza rendition of ‘The Ball of Kirrimuir’, plus ‘Dinah, Dinah, Show Us Your Leg’, cleverly converted into an interminable round. At the end of it all, when it was time for the policeman to make his customary speech, the Ambassador was in the pit of dejection, and he was slumped in his seat wondering how they had managed to stagelight the place in such wonderful colours with no apparent use of lamps.

  The squint-eyed ex-policeman was just beginning to scratch the boil on the side of his nose in the effort of summoning up his eloquence, when from outside in the street there came the cry, ‘Has anyone seen the beast? Has anyone seen the beast?’ and the ragged stranger rode in on his skeletal horse. ‘Ah,’ said Dionisio to his father, ‘it is the three-hundred-year-old man,’ and he regretted it instantly when his father shot him a look of exasperation combined with resignation.

  But Don Emmanuel, the stranger’s last victim, took his chance and leapt out. ‘There,’ he said, pointing to the Ambassador, who was by now so depressed that his head was nodding on his chest. He awoke very briefly as the old man’s stave cracked across his pate, and then lapsed into a perturbed unconsciousness in which Her Majesty The Queen pirouetted coquettishly whilst declaiming obscene versions of ‘The Boy Stood On The Burning Deck’.

  The tumult resulting from the intervention of the old man effectively cancelled the speech of the policeman, whose rhetoric could not be heard above the mêlée of squealing pigs and flailing limbs. When the good-natured attempts of the crowd to restrain the assailant had petered out, it was discovered that the latter had been watching the fray from a safe perch upon the wall. Mama Julia’s dress was torn, the General’s impressive chestful of medals was askew, and Don Emmanuel was nowhere to be seen.

  Just as the day was transforming itself from summer to autumn the citizens awarded the General ‘The Supremely Elevated Order Of The Apparatus’ for his services to democracy, and also to the Ambassador for coming, and for bearing so many sufferings as a consequence. The battered party returned to their helicopter, the Ambassador being carried in a hammock.

  Standing by the aircraft, Mama Julia kissed Dionisio wetly on both cheeks, and the General embraced his son and said, ‘Dio’, this has been the most strenuous and bizarre day of my life.’

  ‘Well, Papa, it is good to learn how the other half lives.’

  ‘Thank God I am in the other half.’

  ‘Where else can one eat pork every day?’

  ‘In Saudi Arabia?’

  The two men laughed, and Mama Julia said, ‘I am beginning to get a headache; can I have another bag of that spinach?’

  The General clambered into the craft and discovered that the pilot was fast asleep with a pornographic magazine on his lap. He gently removed it and beckoned to Hectoro to approach. He spurred his horse forward and the General handed him the glossy publication with the words, ‘I suspect that you would enjoy this.’

  Hectoro held it upside down, flicked through the assembly of splayed lovelies, pondered some of them seriously, and handed back the magazine. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘but for me they are not hairy enough, and most of them are white. Also, I am in the middle of reading another book.’

  ‘I will have it,’ said Misael, and the General tossed it down to him. He tucked it safely into his mochila, grinning so broadly that all his gold teeth caught the flashes of sunset, and the General said, ‘Do not let your wife catch you with it, cabrón.’

  In the morning, in the Montes Sosa residence in Valledupar, the British Ambassador awoke with the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards playing in his head, the bass drum being particularly to the fore. He put on his silk dressing gown inside-out, and his slippers on the wrong feet. Downstairs he went, encountering the General in the hall, where he was supervising the servants in their efforts to polish up the family collection of colonial weapons. ‘I cannot remember anything from yesterday,’ he said. ‘Did I have a good time?’

&nb
sp; ‘I do not speak English,’ replied the General, saying the only English sentence he knew.

  ‘I must have done,’ said the Ambassador, and he went upstairs to dress. He was appalled by the state of his suit; it was filthy with soil about the knees, and the trousers distinctly smelled of childhood accidents. In the pocket he found a basalt phallus on a leather thong, beautifully worked with jaguars in relief, and he found a note scrawled on a morsel of dirty paper.

  He took them downstairs and summoned up enough Castilian to ask the General what they were. ‘This,’ said the General, holding up the phallus, ‘is the insignia of The Supremely Elevated Order Of The Apparatus, and the note says that everyone was very impressed by your boots.’

  In Cochadebajo de los Gatos the reputation enjoyed by the British for magnanimity stems from the fact that the Ambassador, fearing that he must have done something disgraceful on his lost day, ordered a consignment of wellington boots of varying sizes from London, to be sent in the diplomatic bag. These he despatched to Cochadebajo de los Gatos, where they are still worn on splendid and special occasions, according to a strict rota laid down by the informal council of leaders.

  46 How Aurelio Became Himself

  IT IS I, Aurelio, who speaks, and General Fuerte who makes the marks. Already he tells me, ‘Aurelio, talk more slowly,’ and his pen scratches like a mouse. I say, ‘Speak of what?’ and he replies, ‘Aurelio, speak of yourself, I am collecting information.’ He compares me to a butterfly that is seldom seen, and I am pleased, but I do not show it because it is bad to smile when one is praised because that is the same thing as to praise oneself, which is a poor praise.

  I am not myself, or to say it in another way, I am many at once within myself, because of my life, and it is for this reason that I talk to General Fuerte who is a white man. Before I became the third person that I am I did not talk to white people because when you look at them you could see that they did not exist. They had no faces, they were like alpacas, they were like cats who avoid and look away. When a white man looked at me he saw an Aymara, he saw my people but not myself, and I too, looking at him, saw only a white man. But I am three people now and I see well. I am one person for each race with whom I have lived, and these three are the one that is myself, and so perhaps that is a fourth, quien sabe?

  It is true that I was Aymara, and it can be seen in my clothes, which are the imitation of a memory, because my original clothes were worn away. I have this wide white hat whose shape reminds me of Carmen’s breast, and so there is another reason to wear it. I have this waistcoat of many strong colours and much gold thread, and my jacket is more strong colours, with woven into it in black the figures of a llama that has never been seen for hundreds of years because they all died.

  But I will tell you that the Aymara are not a good people, they are not gentle like the Quechua, even whose speech is so gentle that it soothes like whispers. The Quechua are more hospitable than we, because once there was a fire, and the only survivors were the hospitable ones. Aymaras like to fight at fiestas, and I lost my own brother in a tinku-fight. I leapt over his grave so that I would grow old. His head was cracked with a rock in a fair wrestle. Also they are always drunk on lamp-alcohol, and they grow stupid from eating nothing but potatoes, and they stink because there is no water up there to waste with washing, because in those parts Pachamama’s body is dying, and that is why you have seen me pour the first of whatever I drink upon the ground, because she is dying of thirst. And this is Inti’s fault, Inti the sun, and the women wash their hair in their own piss for lack of water.

  But it was not always like this. At the first, after Viracocha made us, there was only the moon, and up on the altiplano there were great lakes where now there is only salt and dust. We were a great people of plenty in the days of the moon, our empire was bigger than the Incas’. And there was another people there, worse than us, who were born of slime and lived by fishing, who returned nothing to Pachamama. We called them many names, we called them ‘Munchers of Weeds of the Water’ and we called them ‘Monster-Livered’, and they were an ugly people, stupid, filthy and idle, and now we are fallen and become like them.

  ‘How did you fall?’ asks General Fuerte, scratching with the pen like a chicken in the dust of the street, and I say, ‘Do you want the story or what I myself believe?’ And he says, ‘Both, of course,’ but perhaps the story and what I believe are both two parts of the truth. The story is that the sun came up suddenly one day and dried the lakes, and all the lands of Tiahuanacu about the Stone In The Middle, whose real name nobody knows, turned to salt. And there were twelve tribes of us all fighting each other, and then the Incas came and defeated us because we were divided, and they turned us into Quechuas, most of us. But what I believe is that we fell on account of Tunupa.’

  ‘Who is Tunupa?’ asks the General, and I say, ‘I was going to tell you,’ and he says, ‘Excuse me.’ Tunupa is the one that Misael calls Chango, except that our thunder is kinder than his. Tunupa in the first place lives in volcanoes. Tunupa had five men with him, and they were all alike. They wore white robes to the ground, they were bearded like this, like a bird’s-nest, their eyes were blue and their skins were pale. ‘They were white men?’ asks General Fuerte, and I say, ‘Probably not, because white men spread hatred, and Tunupa spreads love.’ Tunupa told us not to get drunk all the time, and he told us to have one wife. He said, ‘Do good, not bad,’ and he told us to love each other and not to battle with each other, and those who believed him, he sprinkled water on their heads. But he annoyed the King by converting his daughter, and the King, whose name I forget but it will come back to me at a time when I do not need to remember it, he killed all the followers of Tunupa and drove Tunupa away. Nobody knows where Tunupa went. Perhaps he walked out over the sea and became the spume of it, perhaps he broke a bank with his canoe and floated to the sea from Titicaca, perhaps he became one with Viracocha, quien sabe? I believe we fell because we never loved one another, and we stayed drunk and fighting. I see you have a look of surprise, and I know that you think this Tunupa was the god Jesus of the Spanish, and the Spanish thought this too, and they treated us badly because they said that we had killed some saints, so that’s that.

  General Fuerte says, ‘Tell me some more stories of your people,’ and so I say, ‘Have you heard about the monkey and the rabbit?’ and he shakes his head and writes. Once there was a monkey, and he said to the rabbit, ‘Do you find that when you shit, it sticks to your fur?’ and the rabbit says, ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ and so the monkey says, ‘O good,’ and he picks up the rabbit and wipes his backside with it.

  General Fuerte says, ‘Is that a story of your people?’ and I say, ‘It is now, because I just made it up,’ and you say, ‘Ha, ha, now tell me more about yourself.’

  I was one of the Aymara people who lived on the other side of the cordillera from the altiplano, which is to say that my people lived in plenty where Pachamama was not dying. But then the white people sprayed us with poison from the sky, and they shot at us, and they placed bombs under our paths which became thunder and lightning when you trod upon them, and this was because they wanted our land. And that was why we went our way, and I found my way down into the jungle. But before I got there I was struck twice by lightning, and that is how I became a yatiri, which is a brujo, except that in the mountains I had no one to learn from. But I am qualified by the lightning to dress in white and do divinations with the unborn of the llamas, and stick knives in the floor when a child is born and to bury the afterbirth to give it back to Pachamama in return for the child.

  But in the jungle I learned to be the second person that I became, which is a Navante. They were a good people, and that is how I was able to compare and come to the conclusion that the Aymara are not good. The Navantes wrestle each evening, but in a friendly fashion, and no one is killed. It is very good. I had two wives, one after the other, and the first was stolen by the miners, and I never saw her again, and the second died because a white man
came with a bible and he sneezed. That sneeze killed all my children and half of the people, and they all died of the sneezing fever, and so we killed the white man for the sake of the people, because sometimes one must do evil to do good. But we buried him with a cross and with his bible, out of respect, so as not to appear vengeful.

  And in the jungle I learned to be qualified to be a paje, which is in Aymara a yatiri, which is a brujo. And do you wish to know how one learns magic? The General nods and he says, ‘OK Aurelio, but no more silly stories about rabbits,’ and I say, ‘No, because magic is serious stuff.’

  It happened because I saved the life of the sub-chief whose name was Dianari, and consequently my own life was saved by the paje of the tribe when I was dying from being oppressed by the jungle. I will tell you what the paje taught me. Everything has a song, did you know that? All things are cured by songs, but not without the exactly correct song, because each song is a path. Every animal has a song, and to learn the song one must become the animal, which is all very obvious. So to learn songs you take ayahuasca, which is very bitter, or you take shori, which is a vine. And to learn ant songs you let yourself be bitten by ants, and the fire-ant is the worst, with your neck and tongue against a tree, and you eat no food for four days except howler monkeys and songbirds. And you summon the spirits with a trumpet which is an armadillo tail, and you know if it is a bad spirit because it stinks worse than a corpse. And the paje, he dressed me in macaw feathers and necklaces made of snails, and he blew smoke into my mouth, and I learned that to each song there is a path and a spirit which is an animal, and I was completely naked. The spirits cure sickness, did you know that? I sing into the medicine, and the spirit enters it, and sometimes it is a water-spirit child with a baby’s body and a fish’s tail, and one can play a mouthbow too, twang, twang, twang, and that summons spirits like the armadillo-tail trumpet, and there are also the songs of the bamboo flute. And I learned to become many animals. I became a snow-egret so that I could learn to understand the white man, and I flew over his dwellings which are like sky-hills and I said, ‘I would not live like a termite.’ But my best animal is the eagle, it is my animal. I have flown to the end of the sky. Did you know that at the sky’s end it sounds like pigs? I remember when my ears cleared and I could sing, and then I was a paje, and the song said, ‘The harpy eagle is coming,’ and then I was an eagle, and I learned useful information from the other birds. Did you know that the King Vulture is fond of rainbows? And the paje said, ‘Now that you are a sorcerer, people will avoid you, because they will blame misfortune on you because of your magic.’