The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  Don Salvador smiled. ‘Do I not look very like my brother, the Cardinal? We have often been mistaken for each other.’

  Mgr Anquilar wondered if he was being toyed with. ‘Your Eminence, what brings you to these parts?’

  ‘I am Salvador Trujillo Guzman, the Cardinal’s brother, as I have said, and I have something to tell you.’ Don Salvador paused and considered his words, whilst the Monsignor continued to be confused and Father Garcia looked at him open-mouthed. In all their long friendship, in all their many discussions in which they had elaborated their doctrine, Don Salvador had never disclosed that his own brother was the head of the country’s Church.

  Don Salvador looked very directly into the Monsignor’s eyes and said firmly, ‘My brother has always been a very conservative kind of man, especially in matters of the faith. He could never tolerate my levity. But for all that, I always knew that he had more faults than I do myself. We are both dissimulators, but in my case it is very obvious and in his case he hides it even from himself. I have made my living as a false priest who fools no one, and he has lived as an ordained priest who has been careful to fool the right people in order to rise to prominence. Nonetheless I know that my brother has a good heart, and I am certain that he would never have authorised you to commit atrocities and barbarities in God’s name, the name of the Church, or his own.

  ‘I do not know what future you had planned for yourself after this escapade, Monsignor. It seems to me that a man like you has no future other than to be killed or to continue to pile horror upon horror. I cannot imagine you retiring to a cloister having tasted the exhilarating wine of bloodshed and generalship, can you? You have become a cacique, a caudillo –’

  ‘Am I to understand that your point, when you reach it, is going to be that unless I withdraw you will inform your brother of my activities?’ interrupted the Monsignor, his eyes glinting with malice and hostility.

  ‘That is exactly my point, Monsignor. And I also require you to disband your army of marauders and savages.’

  Rechin Anquilar put his hands behind his back and adopted a lofty demeanour that belied his trepidation. It was true that he had never given thought as to how he would return to a workaday life after the crusade; the contemplation of it gave rise to a tremor of dread in his heart, and he knew that sooner or later the details of the episode would emerge, that fingers would sooner or later be pointed at him. For the first time his faith in his mission wavered, and his imagination began to itch with the prospect of having to justify himself.

  ‘My authority comes not from your brother, but from God. My aim is solely to spare souls the pain of Hell.’

  ‘Personally acquainted with Him, are you?’ asked Garcia. ‘And why is it your business whether or not I go to Hell?’

  ‘There is only one law,’ said Don Salvador sententiously: ‘Vivamus atque amemus.’

  ‘“Let us live and let us love?” Is that from the fourth Gospel?’ asked the Monsignor, who was unable under any circumstances to avoid the temptation to fix correctly the attribution of a quotation.

  ‘The Gospel according to Catullus,’ said Don Salvador.

  The Monsignor’s attention seemed to wander. He reflected for a moment. He recalled the names of the two heresiarchs of Cochadebajo de los Gatos that he had read in the submission of the Holy Office, and thought simultaneously of a way of avoiding the story of his exploits ever coming to the Cardinal’s ears. He raised his voice and addressed the crusaders who had gathered round.

  ‘This man,’ he said, pointing, ‘is Salvador. And this man is the alleged “Father” Garcia. They are heretics, and the leaders of heretics. Kill them both, before they pollute this place any further.’

  61 Father Garcia Is Saved By St Dominic

  FATHER GARCIA LOOKED down at the severed head of his companion where it lay in profile upon the mud, and at the body that now seemed to have no identity, as though it were a part of a mannequin. He raised his eyes and looked at the man with the machete who was advancing upon him. He appealed directly to Monsignor Rechin Anquilar. ‘Before I die I would like to say a rosary. As a Christian man, you cannot refuse my request.’

  ‘You should prefer to confess,’ said Anquilar, ‘but say a rosary if it pleases you. There will be no harm in keeping the Devil waiting.’

  Father Garcia crossed himself and recited the Apostles’ Creed. He moved his fingers to the first bead, and, despite himself, he noticed that his fingers were trembling so greatly that the bead slipped his grasp. He recited the Our Father, and moved to the next bead. His knees began to shake, but he said the three Hail Marys and the Glory Be, bowing his head at the name of Jesus. Onwards his fingers moved, and, his voice quavering, he contemplated the first joyful mystery, that of the Annunciation. He said the Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and the Glory Be. A modicum of calm descended upon him, and he moved on to the second joyful mystery of the Visitation. He repeated the formula of the ten Hail Marys and the Glory Be, and proceeded to the mystery of the Nativity. Relentlessly his voice intoned the Hail Marys and the Glory Bes for the mysteries of the Presentation and the Finding In The Temple.

  Father Garcia’s plan had been that in contemplating the mysteries of the rosary he would become rapt, and this would enable him to levitate. He had never levitated to a very great height at any great speed, but was convinced that this could be done merely by intensifying his degree of concentration. But now he was finding that the prospect of imminent and bloody death was paralysing his soul. It was as if only the front part of his brain was operating, and all the rest of it consisted of an undifferentiated jelly of fear that could only repeat, ‘I am going to die,’ and which drowned out the pacifying monotony of his prayers.

  He slowed his voice and tried to cover the Sorrowful Mysteries at a snail’s pace. He looked around at the crusaders as they exchanged bored glances, looked at their watches, and fingered the shafts of their machetes. He tried to close his mind to them, and concentrate upon the Agony In The Garden, the Scourging, the Crowning With Thorns, and the Carrying of the Cross. He arrived at the Crucifixion with his feet still firmly upon the ground and a sense of utter despair burrowing in his heart.

  Even a devout Irishwoman gabbling the rosary at a speed reminiscent of an express takes a very long time indeed to cover an entire rosary in one session. Even such a lady would rarely attempt more than five decades at a time, and Garcia was now beginning the eleventh of the fifteen. At Garcia’s rate it would have been many hours before he finished, and he gave brief thanks in prayer to St Dominic for having decreed that each mystery requires ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be. He slowed his pace still further, and adopted the singsong tone of voice that he knew from experience could send a congregation to sleep.

  On and on he droned, through the glorious mysteries. The Resurrection, the Ascension, the Descent Of The Holy Spirit, The Assumption. At last, his feet still upon terra firma, and his throat dry with panic and repetition, he arrived at the Coronation and embarked upon the concluding litany. He thanked St Dominic for having composed so many honorific epithets for the Virgin, and for having to say ‘Pray for us’ after every one of them. He reached the end of the rosary after five and a half hours, and, heavy with resignation, looked up.

  The crusaders were all wandering about, chatting and joking with each other. The executioner with his machete was nowhere to be seen, and Monsignor Anquilar was discussing something with Father Valentino. It seemed that he had managed to dampen the bloodlust of his persecutors by means of the implausible length of his recitation. Seizing his chance, he began again at the Apostles’ Creed, and sidled away behind one of the tents. From thence he darted to a section of wall, saying the Our Father. He set out briskly for the city, still reciting, and was half way there when he encountered Dionisio Vivo, soaking wet, and striding towards the crusader’s encampment.

  ‘I came to rescue you,’ said Dionisio. ‘I was hoping that they would not dare to touch me because of that story that anyone who tried to harm me wo
uld receive the wound in their own body.’

  ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,’ said Father Garcia, who from now on would be forever unable to get the rosary out of his mind and speech, ‘Thank you, Dionisio, Blessed art Thou amongst women. You know that the stories about you are all true, on Earth as it is in Heaven. You could defeat those bastards on your own, God is with you, Queen Conceived Without Original Sin, so why don’t you? I suppose you got wet swimming across the moat. Did you see that they killed Don Salvador? I will never forget it, Mother Inviolate, it was the worst thing I have ever seen, Hail Holy Queen.’

  ‘Come quickly, Garcia, they have noticed. We will have to run.’

  Together the two men sprinted for the drawbridge, which had been lowered as soon as Dionisio had impulsively dived off the rampart into the moat. A bullet whined past Garcia’s head as he threw himself panting to the cobbles of the street, and the drawbridge was raised. All he could see before his eyes was the scuffed toecap of an old army boot. He raised his eyes, and they met those of Remedios, who was standing above him with her hands on her hips, looking down at him disdainfully. ‘Idiot,’ she said.

  ‘Remedios,’ he gasped, ‘Blessed is the Fruit of Thy Womb, Jesus.’ He nodded, as from now on he always would when he mentioned that Name, and tapped his forehead smartly on the stones. ‘Now and at the hour of our death,’ he said, and passed out with concussion.

  62 The Discussion In The Whorehouse

  FATHER GARCIA’S WORDS weighed heavily with Dionisio. Dionisio’s reputation for miraculous invulnerability and extraordinary power, his title of the Deliverer, and his prolific paternity, had endowed him with a clearly perceived aura of praeternatural invincibility. The fact that his own father was chief of the General Staff, and that even cabinet ministers replied swiftly to his correspondence, seemed also to put him somewhere at the very centre of that vast civil power that enclosed the country in its umbriferous embrace. For most people the state was something to which they knew that they belonged, but which never impinged upon the lives that they led far out on the extremities of the frontiers or deep in the impenetrable interior. No tax gatherers appeared, no health and safety officers inspected the sanitary arrangements in mud huts; there were solely the local judges, quixotic and unpredictable police, and perhaps a deeply unpleasant encounter with the Army once every ten years. The state was simply an enormous machine that rumbled in the far distance, and one’s only connection with it was the ability to remember the colours of the national flag.

  But Dionisio’s presence brought that of the state into focus, and he felt that the non-appearance of the Army, despite his appeal to the government, was a personal betrayal that also diminished him in the eyes of his fellow citizens. This redoubled the weight upon his shoulders of being the Deliverer, who could kill a man simply by touching him. He fell into a mire of self-doubt and fatalism, in which he knew on the one hand that he would be forced to go out on his own to drive away the crusaders, and on the other hand knew also that he might fail miserably and be killed. It seemed a very long time since, deified by his love for Anica and demented by her loss, he had gone out one morning and killed her murderer merely by touching him above the heart. ‘I am becoming an ordinary man,’ he repeated to himself, even though he had been told that when he had gone out with the cats to confront the ‘English’, he had been seen to grow to twice his size.

  With a heavy heart, he went to the perpetual council of war in the whorehouse. When he came through the door, the brothel fell silent. He nodded to those who caught his eye, and went to the table. ‘I have come to tell you,’ he informed them, ‘that I will go out and deal with them myself.’

  ‘Bravo, Dionisio,’ said Remedios, when the applause had died down, ‘we expected no less. Nonetheless, we have decided against it.’

  ‘There would be no satisfaction in it,’ said Hectoro. ‘If it had been a matter of inconveniencing us, and annoying us by wrecking the terraces, then perhaps we would say, ‘Why not?’ but now they have killed Don Salvador, who went out in peace to negotiate, and the whole thing has become personal.’

  ‘Each of us wishes to participate in driving them out,’ added Misael, ‘and to ask you to do it would be to cheat ourselves of the opportunity to be tall and strong. I too am a man, as is everyone here.’

  ‘I think that you are becoming confused,’ commented Remedios, raising her eyebrows laconically.

  ‘In that case,’ said Dionisio, who had now begun to feel disappointed, ‘I shall be at your service as you require it,’ and he sat down next to the shade of Josef, who was contemplating fixedly the glass that was always placed before him in his memory.

  ‘Now, what plans have we been able to come up with?’ asked Remedios, who had assumed the role of leader by an accidental process that was clear to no one, but which nonetheless appeared inevitable.

  ‘I had a plan,’ said Profesor Luis, ‘to disguise our tractors as dragons that belch fire. I thought we could drive them out at night with the lights on, painted like eyes, and I thought that we could put whistles on the exhaust so that they sound terrifying. But I have been unable to invent a flame-thrower with what I have available, and I can think of no way to protect the drivers from bullets.’

  ‘I had a plan,’ said Hectoro, ‘to deliver them some of Dolores’ Chicken Of A True Man. I thought of doing it in a huge cauldron, and sending it out as a peace offering. It has a delayed reaction, as you know, and I thought that whilst they were running about clutching their throats and weeping with pain, we could come out and attack them. But then I realised that they would not eat it for fear of poison, and I thought, “What if I go out and eat some in front of them to prove that it is harmless?” but then I understood that they would shoot me down immediately before they ate it. Naturally I have no fear of death, but it occurred to me that I might be needed in the fight, and so I do not have this plan anymore.’

  ‘Do you have to come to these meetings mounted on your horse?’ demanded Consuelo the whore of Hectoro, puffing vehemently upon her cigar. ‘You do not know how stupid you look with your sombrero crushed into the ceiling. And I am tired of cleaning up the turds of your horse.’ She spat on the floor, disdainfully ignoring his baleful glare.

  ‘I had a plan to kidnap one of them at night. One who knows their plans,’ said Misael. ‘But then I thought, “What if he swallows the plans, and refuses to shit them out?” So I thought, “We should threaten to cut open his guts to get the plans,” and then he would shit himself, and we could get the plans like that.’

  ‘With respect, cabrón, that is a very stupid plan,’ said Pedro.

  ‘I know,’ said Misael, grinning so that his camouflaged gold tooth rendered his smile grotesque. ‘It came to me in a dream, and that is the only reason I mention it.’

  ‘It seems to me that we must come out and attack them,’ said Hectoro.

  ‘By God, I would like to slit their English noses,’ interjected the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura. ‘I will take out all my soldiers, and we will hack them with our swords, pierce them with our pikes, blind them with our poignards, and leave their heads on spikes for the crows to feast.’ He slammed the table with his fist, so that those seated at it had to jerk backwards to evade the runnels of spilled liquor.

  ‘With respect, Conde, a frontal assault is likely to be bloody on our side, and leave them unscathed,’ said General Fuerte gently. ‘Such heroics would have no ingenuity, as Misael would say.’

  ‘We could do it at night,’ observed Hectoro, ‘but then we would be likely to kill each other by mistake. Not that I am afraid, but I would not like to kill my friends, unless it were a matter of honour.’

  ‘I favour an attack from behind,’ said the General. ‘It would be completely unexpected, and therefore very successful.’

  A collective gasp of dismay arose from the company. ‘General,’ said Remedios, ‘we would have to go down to the plateau, and then find a way back up by another route to get behind
them. It might take weeks, and none of us knows the way. We could get lost and die in the wilderness.’

  ‘We would have to go right up on the paramo before we could come down again,’ said Misael. ‘Have you ever been up there?’ The General shook his head. ‘It is so cold that one’s balls retreat into one’s body as far as one’s throat, so that one cannot swallow. One’s fingers become bananas. One’s hair becomes encrusted with ice. The wind blows from every quarter at once and slides inside one’s garments like the frozen fingers of a dead whore. The rain is sharper than knives and cuts the soul as deeply as the flesh. Sometimes it snows suddenly, and one is instantly buried, and sometimes the wind whips the snow from the peaks and one becomes blind. Sometimes one becomes blind from the light in any case, and the soroche comes down on you so that a terrible sickness strikes at the brain, leaving you reeling like a drunkard on the point of death from pisco, with your eyes popping from your head. At other times there are sudden mists that arrive from nowhere, and you breathe water, and you see not even your own hands before you, and all you do see are the shadows of the dead looming and lunging. We went through the paramo when we came to this place, and none of us wants ever to return.’

  There was a lengthy and depressed silence as the people contemplated this familiar tale of the horrors of the paramo. Dionisio leaned forward. ‘What if there is someone who knows of an easy route? Aurelio knows these mountains like no one else. If we asked him to lead us, surely there would be no problem. The General’s plan is by far the best.’

  ‘You should compromise,’ said Josef, speaking with difficulty for the first time since his death. ‘Some should stay, and attack when the others come from behind.’