The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  This was true in the end, because I could not cure the sneezing death, and that is why I left to live on my own and breed dogs. I married Carmen who is black, except that her hair was red before it turned white, and I became the third person which I am now, who lives with any people without trouble or loss of understanding, several peoples at once. And now I know how many kinds of magic there are. I have learned that there are priests who turn wine to blood and bread to flesh, in substance but not in appearance, which is a great mystery. I know that Pedro knows the magic of animals, and there is Dionisio who is a different kind of brujo all to himself because we made him that way when there was a candomble and all the saints gave him powers by dancing and singing.

  So now I live down there in the jungle with Carmen and with my daughter Parlanchina who is dead and has a child so that I am grandfather to a spirit. She watches the paths in the jungle, she guards them, and she walks always with an ocelot who she loves and sleeps with, and she is married to Federico who is Sergio’s son, and Federico is also dead, and he likes to watch the paths in the mountains. I say to Parlanchina, ‘Watch out, Gwubba, a marriage cannot last when one of you is always in the mountains and the other is in the jungle,’ and she says, ‘But Papacito, you live in both places at once. Who are you to talk?’ And I laugh, because it is true. I love Parlanchina with my whole heart and when I see her I want to weep because she is so beautiful, and she is like you, she makes me tell stories the whole time, but she does not write them down, she remembers them, and even so, she makes me tell them over and over. I told her a story yesterday, do you want to hear it? Good. Here is the story.

  Once a man went fishing, and he caught a giant eagle, and he thought, ‘I will paint it blue and red,’ and so he did. He took it to the top of a volcano to throw it in as a sacrifice, but the eagle objected, and he threw the man in instead. And that is the end of the story.

  General Fuerte asks me, ‘Is that an ancient story of your people?’ and I say, ‘No, it was a dream I had,’ but maybe one day it will be an ancient story. Every story has to begin somewhere. Surely you have had enough of writing? And the General shakes his hand because of the cramp and says, ‘Anyway, the pen is running out,’ and I say, ‘That is why memory is superior. It has no pen to run out.’

  47 St Thomas Recalls

  I USED TO be fond of quoting Augustine in matters of heresy, and now when I peruse his work I am forcibly obliged to reflect upon how it is that those of us who are connected directly with God and are enamoured of reason and law can deduce with such clarity propositions whose practical application can lead to such lamentable consequences. How easy it was to formalise the processes of Socratic dialogue into objections, answers, and replies to objections; how easily my mind flowed with my pen, co-ordinating and collating with edifying lucidity the sciences of Aristotle, the message of the Gospels, the commentaries of Saints Ambrose and Gregory, and even the illuminating writings of the learned infidels. How often I would retire late to my bed, a thousand quotations, precepts and precedents whirling in my head, and how often I would awake early in the morning with everything in perfect order, so that I would arise with a merry heart and set my secretaries to work, scribbling furiously what had been dictated to me in my repose! So great was the joy of my work that all care slipped away from me, and my mind dwelled not a moment even on the temptations of the flesh.

  And now I have been drowned by the overwhelming presence of true flesh, in all its agony and valour, and daily I hear my own learned words on the lips of others who use them in perpetration of the Devil’s work, as though all my caveats and reservations counted for nothing, as though my theoretical positions, achieved with such travail of reason, should be taken as truer than the Gospels and translated to brutality. How much better if my life had passed unremarked and unrecorded in the damp silence of the cloisters! How much better if all my work had mouldered unread in the fungal labyrinth of the University of Paris! I have heard a tale of Mohammed, that once, when called to prayer, he perceived that a cat was asleep upon his robe, whereupon he severed the end of his robe rather than perturb the cat. And yet this is the man in whose name have been committed uncountable atrocities, and now, like me, he walks unhappy in the paths of paradise.

  I have seen such things! At the edge of a lake there were Aymaras who met there in silence each year with the purpose of waiting for the white man to go. These were butchered on the grounds that it is heretical to believe in the departure of the white man when their arrival had been willed by God, because otherwise it could not have occurred!

  There was a young woman who was accused of having aborted a child. She was told that abortion was murder, and that murder was a mortal sin, and therefore she deserved to die, and therefore she would die. She protested her innocence vehemently and demanded proof, whereupon she was told, ‘If you are guilty, then you deserve to die, and if you are innocent, then you will arrive in heaven all the sooner, so it will be good for you to die earlier than you would have done,’ and she was abused by the bodyguard so that when they killed her she was in very truth impregnated, and the child died within her, and therefore an abortion was performed by the same people who condemned her for that sin.

  And I have seen a man, who, in proof of his innocence, offered to throw himself from a high place, and with my own eyes I saw him float down from a steeple, only to be killed at the bottom on the premise that such miracles might only be performed by Satan’s aid.

  I have seen forgiveness bought at great prices by those who are rich and terrified, and I have seen lunatics throw themselves upon pyres rather than abandon their delusions. I have seen the intellectually modest informed that doubt is sinful, and summarily dispatched, and I have longed for the humanism of the ancients who declared that in philosophy all things are doubtful and open to question. And I remember writing somewhere that Jews should be spared because their faith bears witness to ours, but I have smelt the stench of glowing brands smoking upon the bodies of the innocent, and I have heard it laid down as law that writers, doctors, clerks and itinerant artists are all heretics by nature and inclination, and the doctors are killed and the heretics told that medical treatment is forbidden them.

  In one place the people took refuge in sanctuary, and the church was burned down upon their heads so that even the orthodox perished, and the Monsignor who knows my work so well smacked his lips and said, ‘Where blessings come to nothing, the stick will prevail.’ And afterwards he regaled his men with tales of the miracles of St Dominic, a man who has never been seen in paradise.

  I remember in another place there was a town where all were dedicated to the faith of one Ricardo of Rinconondo, and it was a place where Father Valentino turned to the Monsignor and said with great anxiety in his voice, ‘What do we do if they all convert?’ and the latter replied, ‘Do not worry, hardly any of them will convert.’ They left it utterly destroyed, even though a negotiator had been let out on the promise of free passage, and then perfidiously slain. They went to dig up and burn the mortal remains of their saint, Ricardo, but they had been exhumed already by the faithful and carried away, sown up in the hide of an ox. And there was a Jew there, and someone proposed to spare him because he had been tortured, had converted, and had betrayed many others, but the Monsignor burst into the room, and he placed thirty pieces of silver on the table, exclaiming, ‘For what price is Christ to be sold once more to the Jews?’ and so they fabricated a charge that the Jew had cut out the heart of a Christian infant and then crucified it as a spell to destroy Christians, making him confess to it. There was also an old woman who was mad, distracted with grief because of the extinction of her family, and she came forward each day to denounce herself in the hope of death, but each day they sent her away in order to enjoy her torment. Then there came a day when she did not denounce herself, and so they arrested her and condemned her upon the evidence of her previous confession. She was thrown upon the flames like all the others, wearing a dunce’s hat upon which was inscribed
the names of all the crimes she had admitted.

  There was another place built upon a prominence and walled about, where the inhabitants wisely locked the gates to exclude the invaders. But the bodyguard emptied the cemetery and slaughtered the cattle, and improvised trebuchets with which they launched the corpses over the walls, and then went their way in the hope that the townsfolk would die of pestilence. In that episode a priest was killed by a rock hurled by a woman from the walls, but I felt no grief, for which God forgive me.

  Everywhere that this crusade processed it was the policy to excommunicate upon one pretext or another all who owned property, so that progress was infinitely slowed by oxcarts groaning with chattels, and it became impossible to travel across the countryside. Everywhere the prospect of easy wealth encouraged the vicious and the dissolute to join the campaign. No one of that company had been given the right or power of excommunication, and in this respect I judge that there was a plenary exercise in cynicism. But what appalled me the most and most oppressed my soul was the absolute sincerity and conviction of the priests.

  Would to God that I had never written, and my penance has been the infinite weariness of guiding away the dead.

  48 Of Concepcion and Dominic Guzman

  DOMINIC GUZMAN AND Concepcion left the capital in their new jeep, trailed by a convoy of the press. They crossed the high plains, where the chrysanthemum houses sparkled in the sun as though innocent of the fate of the poor women who worked inside. They drove past the deserted and diseased greenhouse where Dionisio’s greatest love, Anica, and her unborn child, had been butchered by the henchmen of the worst of the coca lords, and out into the rolling mountains of the Cordillera Oriental.

  The cordillera disposed of the convoy. Desperate for the best pictures, those at the back overtook on blind corners and precipitate slopes. One jeep hurled itself over a chasm, another crashed head-on into a gaily painted bus laden with hopeful rural migrants, and a third slewed sideways on the scree of a landslip, so that all the vehicles behind it piled together in an inextricable tangle of bumpers and photographic paraphernalia. Soon there would be yet more tinselly little shrines at the side of the road, marking a death with candles, flowers, a statue of the Virgin, and a monochrome photograph of the deceased.

  Beyond Tunja the world lost trace of the couple, who had turned from the main road and found a place to rest in a tiny pueblo near Arcabuco. It was a village that obeyed the old custom of maintaining a shelter for travellers, open-sided, but with a roof of woven palm, and with well-bedded poles from which to sling a hammock.

  They sat on the front of their jeep eating bocadillo, the sandwich of invert sugar and guava that one buys carefully wrapped in the leaf of banana or palm, and watched the sun set on the snow of the peaks. The brilliant and scintillating colours reflected each other from one mountain to the next and back from the surface of the clouds until the whole sky was illuminated, and Guzman turned to Concepcion and said, ‘Querida, it was watching the sunset that first made me feel religious.’

  She licked the sugar from her fingers, and wiped them on the print of her dress. ‘It is also watching the sunset that makes one cold.’

  ‘I have a padded jacket for you,’ he said, and went to the jeep, returning with a quilted coat. She inspected it, felt the material with her fingers, sighed, and said, ‘I would feel like a stranger wearing that. I will go and fetch my poncho.’

  Dominic Guzman felt suddenly like a failure. ‘We two have never lived in each other’s company, like a man and wife, sharing everything. I am afraid that I will be no good at it.’

  He thought of all the things he had never done. He had never been to the market and shopped for her when she was ill. He had never asked her opinion, let alone conceded to it or compromised. He had never made a meal, cut wood, or swept the floor. ‘I am very ignorant,’ he said.

  ‘Tchaa,’ said Concepcion. ‘Everything will be learned with time.’

  ‘I only know about big ideas,’ continued Guzman, as though he had not heard her.

  ‘Anyone can have big ideas,’ said Concepcion. ‘I have some big ideas, and most of them I thought of for myself, and then I found out that others have thought the same, and then I found out that other people have big ideas that are exactly the opposite. And when I think about it even more, I decide that only small ideas can be true, and the big ideas are too big to fit inside anybody’s mind, so there is no point in trying to have them. You know what my mother used to say, when I asked her a question like, “Why does God let babies die?” She said, “Pregunta a las mariposas.” Go and ask the butterflies, because they don’t know any better than anyone else.’

  Guzman laughed and scratched the scar of his operation with a gesture that had become an unconscious habit. ‘How should one live then?’ he asked.

  ‘We must give some more sugar-water to the hummingbird,’ said Concepcion, following with her finger the shimmering little creature that was darting about her head delicately removing the grains of bocadillo from her lips, ‘and we must give the bird a name, so that we can call it. I will put drops of honey on a list of names, and the bird will choose its own name.’

  Until that point the pueblo had seemed deserted, except for two dogs, numerous chickens, and a vast sow that was fast asleep in a scrape of her own making. But as the world was on the point of darkness and Guzman was looking in the glove-pocket of the jeep for a flashlight, a small procession of cholos entered the village. On their shoulders they bore billhooks and spades, and accompanying them were weary little mules laden with stupendous piles of quinoa and alfalfa.

  The villagers looked at them incuriously as they filed past, each one raising a hand and saying, ‘Buena’ tardes.’ Guzman raised his hand in the customary gesture of blessing, but converted it diffidently into a wave of greeting.

  ‘They are hard people,’ came a voice from behind them that bore a distinctly Putumayo accent. ‘They drink too much, they don’t wash, they work without resting, they fight, they don’t vote, and you can never tell what they’re thinking.’

  Guzman and Concepcion turned about, to behold a large black man with a shotgun, garbed in tattered clerical dress. His priestly shoes were coming apart at the uppers, and on his head he wore a straw sombrero that had frayed about the rim. ‘Don Balsal,’ he said. ‘I am the priest, and those are my little flock. May I offer you something to eat? A little coffee? A bed for the night? I have a nice little hut.’

  ‘We would be very grateful,’ said Guzman. ‘We had been reconciling ourselves to a night out in the fresh air.’

  The priest hunched his shoulders ironically, and said, ‘I can assure you that it will be just as cold in my hut, but at least you will not be disturbed by Olga.’ In response to the couple’s puzzled expressions, the priest pointed to the sow. ‘Olga,’ he said. ‘She lives off the excrement of the villagers, since there is little else to feed her with. She seems to enjoy it, but I, for one, would consequently not enjoy her company out here. If she ever gets eaten we will all die of parasites, if we have not first died of something else. I haven’t been paid for five years.’

  Guzman flushed with guilt, and held his peace. He and Concepcion followed Don Balsal into his palm hut, and found themselves confined to a prison of darkness disturbed only by the sound of the priest moving about. A match flared, and a taper was lit that quickly filled the room with the noxious fumes of burning fat. The priest unceremoniously lifted a chicken from its nest on a shelf, and triumphantly produced an egg. ‘Supper,’ he announced.

  Guzman went to the jeep and returned with a box of food, a small camping stove, and a bottle of wine. ‘You can keep all this,’ he said to the shadow that he had to assume was Don Balsal. ‘I will buy some more tomorrow.’

  Don Balsal lifted the taper over the box and whistled. ‘Gold, frankincense and myrrh,’ he said. ‘I think I will keep the wine for communion, as I have always had doubts about having to use pisco and aguardiente.’

  In the tenebrous light of th
e taper and of the stove, Concepcion showed Don Balsal how to make arepas with maize flour, eggs and dende oil. The latter was overcome with the simple delight of it, and exclaimed, ‘Señora, blessed art thou among women! This is a skill that I shall pass on to everyone.’

  ‘Why do you carry a shotgun?’ asked Guzman suddenly. ‘I would not have expected it of a priest.’

  Don Balsal transferred his attention from the arepas and replied, ‘Because it would be irresponsible not to. The coca people send out jeeps to abduct the little daughters of the peasants, and not long ago a party of religious fanatics arrived at La Loma and wiped out the whole village. What am I supposed to do? In places like this one is not just the priest, you know. One is the schoolteacher, the doctor, the Army, the police, the vet. There used to be a priest in every village around here, and now I am the last, so that I am always walking from one place to another. I even have to chew coca leaves like everyone else, just to keep going. I have written to the Cardinal many times.’