The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Soon this house will be the size of the temple of Viracocha,’ I said, and Lena kissed me on the end of my nose. ‘Don’t you love us any more?’

  Ena put her hand down my shirt, and I felt the familiar terror coming over me. Lena took the cigarette from my mouth and stubbed it on the tiles beneath her foot. ‘We had better go to bed,’ she said, ‘before Don Emmanuel comes round and plays any more jokes on you.’

  All the children seemed to start crying at once, and one of the cats bit the strings on my guitar so that one of them broke with a slap and a twang. ‘Can’t I have another cigarette?’ I asked, but we went to bed anyway.

  2

  Your Eminence,

  We of the Holy Office, both before and after the resignation of Cardinal Guzman, have for a long time felt that our institution has been of little value. Since submitting our report to Cardinal Guzman, for which service he at one time rewarded us with the accusation that we were ‘Communist subversives’, we have had no precisely defined role, and there has been no indication that one would ever be found for us. Cardinal Guzman’s principal concern was with doctrinal orthodoxy, whereas ours was with the laxity of our own clergy, and the quality of pastoral care. As far as we know, no action was in any case taken after the submission of our report.

  We therefore welcome your decision to abolish this office and release us to return to our diocesan duties, and we also congratulate you upon your appointment to the cardinalate.

  3

  ‘One of the strange things about history,’ said Profesor Luis to his class of dark-eyed little children, ‘is that it has long periods of idleness, and then makes everything happen all at once. In that respect it is like you, since none of you have given me last week’s homework, and you are all going to give it to me tomorrow, without fail. Or else.’

  4

  ‘I have a letter from my father,’ said Dionisio to Profesor Luis as they sat with their feet on the table, ready to remove them ashamedly when Farides peeped out of the kitchen. ‘He says that it was not the Communists or the Liberals or the Conservatives who were trying to assassinate him. It turned out to be a lunatic who thought that my father was not the real General Hernando Montes Sosa.’

  Profesor Luis smiled. ‘Who did he think the real one was, then?’

  ‘It was not a “he”. It was a woman. She thought that she herself was.’

  ‘The world is full of them,’ said Profesor Luis. ‘History is more or less entirely a catalogue of the actions of lunatics.’

  ‘Here’s to the end of History,’ said Dionisio, raising his glass. The two friends clinked their glasses together, drank their toast, and sat together in a reflective silence.

  ‘Here’s to no more lunatics,’ added Profesor Luis.

  5

  Capitan Papagato lay in his immense hammock with his four pet jaguars, clutched his stomach, and was appalled by the terrible pain of his wife’s labour. Francesca hung onto the rope that was suspended from the roof, and squatted over the pit lined with palm-leaves, where she would drop her baby when it was born, and where later the afterbirth would be buried.

  The Capitan heard the joyful hubbub of the birth, and Francesca came over bearing a little bundle in a shawl. She put Federico into the Capitan’s arms, and said, ‘It’s all right, Papagato, you can stop hurting now because it is all over.’

  The Capitan wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve, and said, ‘My God, it was like shitting a cannonball.’

  On the other side of the street Leticia Aragon, like a Russian doll, gave birth to an exquisite child which itself contained a tiny foetus. Aurelio, Carmen, and Dionisio gazed in wonder at the new child, because her black hair flowed down to her waist and her deep brown eyes gazed back at them with the glow of recognition. Carmen asked permission of Leticia, and held the baby to her own bosom. She looked at Aurelio and said, ‘It is our little Gwubba. Parlanchina has come back to us.’

  Dionisio felt a choke of emotion rise in his throat, because when he looked at Aurelio he realised that it was the first time he had ever seen an Indian weep.

  Carmen took the child and laid her in the crib which she would share with Federico until they were old enough to share a bed, since they were long married already in the other world. Aurelio put in an abandoned ocelot kitten that he had found mewing upon a jungle path, and later Leticia fed both Parlanchina and the kitten, one at each breast.

  6

  ‘Has anyone seen the beast? Has anyone seen the beast?’ called the three-hundred-year-old man, as he cantered over the drawbridge upon his rachitic horse. ‘Has anyone seen the beast whose stomach rumbles like a pack of dogs, taking many shapes, and devastating the land? Has anyone seen the beast?’

  In the plaza the ancient man’s horse fell forward upon its knees with exhaustion, and he leapt clear of it just before it trapped his leg by rolling over to die. ‘Ay, ay, ay, my thirty-fourth horse,’ wailed the old man, tearing at his hair and raising his eyes accusingly to the heavens.

  The people of the city gathered around in delight as the three-hundred-year-old man displayed the pyrotechnical virtuosity of his grief. He beat the ground, he kicked his horse in the hope of reviving it, he ululated and gesticulated, until at last he remembered himself and asked bathetically, ‘Has anyone seen the beast?’

  ‘The beast came here, but unfortunately we killed it ourselves, since you were not here to do it.’ It was Pedro who spoke.

  The old man’s shaggy eyebrows quivered, and a trail of saliva emerged from the corner of his mouth. ‘You killed the beast? But I cannot die until I have killed it myself. I have searched for three hundred years. What will I do?’

  ‘You can continue to live,’ said the Mexican musicologist. ‘If you cannot die unless you have killed it and we have killed it already, then it follows that you will live forever.’

  ‘Ay, ay, ay,’ lamented the old man, running in small circles, ‘I have lost my thirty-fourth horse and I will live forever.’

  ‘Do not worry, viejo,’ said Pedro. ‘Our beast did not have a rumbling stomach, so perhaps it was the wrong one, and you will still get your chance.’

  ‘The wrong one? The wrong one? I pray that it was so, or I will live forever with my horses dying beneath me.’

  ‘We have the beast’s horse, and you are welcome to it,’ said Remedios. ‘I for one want no souvenirs of him in this city. Would you fetch it, Hectoro?’

  ‘I will fetch it,’ said Hectoro stiffly, ‘not because I was told to do so by a woman, but because I had already had the idea for myself.’

  Hectoro came back with the great black stallion and handed the rein to the old man. His eyes opened wide with rapture as he stroked the shining flanks and raised his hand to prove that it was the biggest horse he had ever had. He unsaddled his dead mount and tried to transfer it to the new, but the saddle was plainly too small. ‘Never mind,’ he said happily, ‘from now on I will go bareback. Is there still a cantina here? I could eat a thousand pigs, complete with teeth, trotters and bones.’

  ‘Doña Flor’s?’ said Don Emmanuel, mindful of the beating he had received from the old man when he had been mistaken for the beast. ‘Yes, Dolores still has Doña Flor’s. If you want a good meal you should try the Chicken of a True Man.’

  7

  On the day that the last traces of red paint vanished from the face of the moon, Dominic Guzman and Concepcion entered the end of the valley and saw before them the city of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. They had left their new jeep at Santa Maria Virgen with Ines and Agapita, where they tended it with as much concern as they lavished upon the car of Dionisio, except that they were charging forty pesos a day to the strangers.

  ‘This is the place,’ said Dominic Guzman, and they began the long walk between the terraces that rose high upon either side, and which were now once more draped with vegetation.

  ‘Salvador, Salvador,’ cried Father Garcia, looking up from The Book Of Mormon which he had found in Dionisio’s bookshop, and was now read
ing avidly as he sat upon a sunny rock outside the city. He left the book and sped towards the couple, embracing Dominic Guzman and kissing him upon his cheeks with the rapidity of a harpsichord continuo.

  Concepcion looked both astonished and amused, and Guzman, mistaking the name for its meaning, said, ‘I am nobody’s saviour.’

  ‘He thinks that your name is Salvador,’ explained Concepcion. ‘You know, like that brother you are always talking about.’

  Father Garcia, so excited and pleased that he could not make sense of himself, turned and ran back to the city, waving his arms and shouting, ‘The False Priest has returned! Salvador is with us! Virgin most prudent, pray for us!’

  ‘False Priest? Salvador?’ repeated Guzman, dumbfounded.

  Naturally the confusion was eventually resolved, but not before Guzman had been embraced and kissed by everyone in the city, including a troupe of pretty whores who embarrassed him mightily in front of Concepcion by referring to exploits of which he genuinely had no knowledge. Very soon it seemed perfectly reasonable that the brother of the False Priest should have arrived because he was searching the entire world for his son, and had heard that there was a great wise man in Cochadebajo de los Gatos who could peer beyond the veil to help him.

  Aurelio looked at the minute and iridescent pet hummingbird that was sipping honey from Concepcion’s lips, and said gnomically, ‘Why search for something that is not lost?’

  8

  His Excellency President Veracruz arrived exhausted at the Presidential Palace. It was true that Madame Veracruz had been greatly rejuvenated by repeatedly making love in the Great Pyramid, but he himself had not, more especially as the overuse of his apparatus had finally caused it to expire with fatigue, rendering it necessary for him to arrange another trip to the United States as soon as possible. He was, despite this disaster, overwhelmingly pleased to be back home.

  Mme Veracruz, however, was not. She had sulked and wept on the aeroplane, thrown a tantrum at the airport, and in the limousine had demanded to be taken at once to Paris, because, ‘Here there is no civilisation.’

  His Excellency went up to his office and found that nothing had changed. His secretaries were still filing their nails and talking to their boyfriends on the supposedly secure telephone lines, and his revolver was still in the drawer of his desk. He sat down at it, and discovered with annoyance that the ink in his pen had dried in such a way that no more could be sucked into it with the squeezy rubber tube.

  He was shaking it vigorously, with a perplexed expression, when one of his secretaries came in and said, ‘You had better go, Your Excellency, or you will be late.’

  ‘Late? For what?’

  ‘Why, the impeachment of course.’

  ‘Impeachment? Whose impeachment? What are you talking about, woman?’

  ‘Your impeachment,’ said the secretary sweetly, ‘for dereliction of Presidential duties as laid down in the constitution. At the Senate House at two o’clock.’

  His Excellency was apoplectic. He waved his arms, his face reddened with rage. ‘At two o’clock? What about siesta? What about the trade credits I got from Andorra? Impeachment! They dare to impeach me when I am not here?’

  ‘They impeached you because you were not here, Your Excellency.’

  ‘It’s the fucking Conservatives,’ he shouted, throwing his pen to the floor and kicking the desk.

  ‘It was an all-party motion,’ replied the secretary in a mistaken attempt to soothe him.

  ‘My own party, too? Et tu Judas?’

  ‘Brutê corrected the secretary, retreating from the room for fear of the blotting-pad that was being aimed at her head.

  Madame Veracruz threw herself into the room in a whirlwind of hysterical shrieks and imprecations. ‘Our daughter’s gone, our little daughter. Disappeared! Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay!’

  ‘You mean the cat has deserted us too, you cretinous woman! How many times have I told you that I cannot be the father to a black cat?’

  ‘But Daddykins, you saw it when it was born,’ wailed Madame Veracruz, her maquillage so reconstituted by her tears that her face had taken on the appearance of a painting by the late Jackson Pollock.

  A tearful and repentant chambermaid entered the room from the door that led to the presidential suite. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ she said, ‘it was a month ago, and I had just put the new pink bow around her neck as Madame Veracruz told me to do every day, sir, and I brushed her and gave her some Turkish delight, as I was told, sir.’ The maid kneaded the duster that was in her hands. ‘And then I looked round and she had gone, sir. We searched the whole place, sir, and we even told the police and the Interior Ministry, but no one saw her, sir, and we had to give up.’

  The maid shrieked as Madame Veracruz threw herself across the room and wrenched out a large hank of her hair whilst slapping her face resoundingly. ‘Slut,’ she howled, ‘whore of a bitch of a pimp’s cocksucking mother of a whore!’

  Madame Veracruz turned her attention from the maid and dramatically tore down the curtains. She overthrew the Presidential desk, bit His Excellency’s restraining hand, and flung herself from the room amid a tempest of howls and recondite obscenities that had not passed her lips since her days as a ‘hostess’ and ‘actress’ in the Panamanian strip-club.

  His Excellency heaved a sigh that embodied every scrap of bitterness and resignation in the world. Desperate for a morsel of peace and quiet, and worried lest the affliction that he had picked up in Cairo might reassert itself during the impeachment hearing, he made his way to the highest lavatory in the land and closed the door.

  It was wonderful. As usual, Beethoven played gently in order to drown out the intestinal rumbles of his executive bowels. He took off his trousers because when he was a little boy a jet of urine had once squirted under the rim of the seat and discomfitingly wetted his underwear where it had lain crumpled about his feet, and he sat down wearily. He had the reassuringly familiar thought that one of these days he must get the seat upholstered, or an electrical warming-coil installed.

  ‘I was very right and wise,’ he said to himself as his intestines released more of the malodorous and sloppy aftermath of his visit to Egypt. He began to feel equal to the task of facing the impeachment, and commenced to compose long and noble speeches in which he defended his lengthy absence on the grounds of the national interest, to the gentle and arpeggiated rhythm of the Moonlight Sonata.

  He consigned the paper to the pedal bin and stood up to flush the chain. He was rewarded with a dry clanking noise that left the evidence of his activities entirely undisturbed. He pulled again, with as little result.

  No president in the world, even one facing impeachment, feels able to leave evidence such as there lay in that lavatory bowl; it would have been so demeaning as to be even more unacceptable than to be caught naked in a public place with a little boy on the end of one’s virile member. Even assassination would be preferable.

  He scratched his head and wondered how it was that a cistern might dry out, even from disuse. He lowered the protective cover of the seat and climbed up on it in order to peer inside the reluctant tank and find out what was amiss.

  Although a tall man, he could not see very well, and he went up on his tiptoes, lifting the scrolled and gilded metal lid. He leaned back to bring the flex of the light a little closer, and very suddenly the flimsy cover of the lavatory gave way beneath him.

  Down he plunged. His feet slid with unerring accuracy around the bend at the bottom of the bowl, and he fell backwards, knocking his head violently upon the tiles of the floor. When he awoke, he found his feet jammed and his knees compressed together in the hole in the cover. He attempted to raise himself up, but his backside was not upon the floor and his stomach was too weak to cope with the athletic contortions involved in such a manoeuvre. He put his fingers to the back of his head, and found a portentous lump burgeoning upon his occipital bone.

  Throwing pride and dignity to the winds he began to yell, at first with stupendou
s vigour, but thereafter with a forlorn and pitiful hopelessness caused by the fact that the sound system was now thundering and reverberating with the last movement of the Choral Symphony.

  It would not be until Madame Veracruz ran out of places in which to weep that she would be inspired to do so in the lavatory, on the other side of whose rococo door she would discern the despairing whimpers of her husband. He would finally be released by four smirking members of the palace guard in spiked helmets and full ceremonial dress, too late to attend the first of the impeachment hearings that were eventually to bring Foreign Secretary Lopez Garcilaso Vallejo to the presidency.

  Garcilaso’s term of office was to be marked by his unusual dependence upon unminuted interviews with the Archangel Gabriel for advice, by the publication at the state expense of an omnibus edition of all his pseudonymous works upon the occult, and by the unprecedented proliferation of exotic foreign women with unpronounceable names living and cavorting in the many chambers of the palace.

  But prior to all these momentous events the outgoing president lay in the lavatory vanquished by Beethoven, immobilised, with his own oily and fetid excrement lapping about the scrawny bones of his shins. Altogether it had been a most inauspicious week for His Excellency President Enciso Veracruz.

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