The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman

Louis de Bernières is the best-selling author of
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book in 1995. His most recent book is
Notwithstanding.

ALSO BY LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts

Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Red Dog

Birds Without Wings

A Partisan’s Daughter

Notwithstanding

This book is dedicated to my family,

for their unfailing faith and enthusiasm;

to Caroline, for her fund of stories

and her luminous presence; and to all those who are

persecuted for daring to think for themselves.

The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman
Louis de Bernières

Prologue

These events transpired just after the time when the most powerful soft-drinks company in the world pulled off the greatest feat of advertising in modern history.

Fired with the spirit of corporate enterprise, enthused with the idea of refreshing the whole of mankind, and not content that their famous logo was scrolled in neon from Red Square to Tierra del Fuego, they bought into a joint Russian/American space shot, and proclaimed themselves from the heavens in a manner unknown since God Himself set his bow in the sky.

They launched two satellites, one at each pole, to project their name upon the eternal snows so that it was visible in the telescopes of distant races and strange civilisations, who accordingly changed their name for our planet. In the Arctic there evolved new species of red polar bears, foxes, and seals, which were then too conspicuous to leave their boundaries of light and venture into the whiteness, and in the Antarctic the same effect was observed upon emperor penguins.

But this message was as nothing compared to their transformation of the moon. Hundreds of silver-suited workers with post-graduate degrees in astrophysics and low-gravity hydraulics drove their specially designed paint-spray vehicles between hundreds of kilometres of carefully placed markers, until below upon the earth could be seen the company name resplendent, fluorescent, and unmistakable.

Anthropologists set out in droves to the remotest corners of mountain and rainforest in order to gather data upon the effect of this lunar metamorphosis upon primitive thinking, and returned disappointed. Even the Navantes, the Cusicuari, the Kogi, the Acahuatecs, were familiar with the logo that could be found hanging from trees in areas presumed to be unexplored, that could be seen above the doorways of brush huts and painted upon the rocks of Mount Aconcagua.

But with the passage of time even the specially formulated paint
could no longer stand the conditions of our satellite. Sprayed with lunar dust, battered by meteorites, expanded and contracted by extremes of temperature, the writing began to break up until it appeared that the face of the moon was smeared with blood. People would look up at the sky of night, and shudder.

Part One

Hoy, sin miedo que libre escandalice,

puede hablar el ingenio, asegurado

de que mayor poder le atemorice.

En otros siglos pudo ser pecado

severo estudio, y la verdad desnuda,

y romper el silencio el bien hablado.

Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645)

(‘These days, without fear that his freedom will offend, an intelligent man may speak, safe from the intimidation of the more powerful.

In other centuries rigorous criticism, the naked truth, and the eloquent man’s breaking of silence, could have b
een crimes.’)

1
His Eminence, Tormented By Demons, Resolves To Save His Soul

ONCE AGAIN, CARDINAL
Dominic Trujillo Guzman felt a pang like that of childbirth spear him in the belly, and he doubled over, clutching himself and moaning. As always when this happened, his only thoughts were of the guilt of his life. In his anguish it was as if ancient coffers opened before his eyes, but instead of overflowing with gold doubloons, louis d’or, silver crucifixes encrusted with rubies, there spilled out demons.

His Eminence knew all his parade of demons by heart; they were an infernal pantheon that, as he lay there upon the stone floor gaping with anguish, passed before him in a monstrous parody of a Holy Week procession, mocking him for his faults and rejoicing.

At the head of the diabolical rout was the creature with the two contending heads in loud dispute. The necks were indeed swanlike, but their length and flexibility merely made it easier for those vile mouths to dart and bite at each other, as with kisses grown too passionate. ‘Vatican Two, Vatican Two,’ one of the heads was screaming, and the other was shouting, equally shrill, ‘Tradition, tradition,’ as though that was all there was to that time in 1968 when His Eminence had attended the very first conference of Latin American bishops in Medellin. He was a powerful man even then, and he had gone away in disgust, determined to do away altogether with the influence of Liberation Theology in his own episcopacy. To be sure he had tried reason, persuasion, and the quoting of precedents, but that did not prevent his priests from abandoning their worldly goods and disappearing into the backlands with only a donkey and a wooden crucifix to stir up the discontent of the poor, fill their minds with economic theories that had nothing to do with the maintenance of churches and cathedrals, and everything to do with dispossessing those very rich people whose generosity it was that ensured that the Virgin should be represented by silver statues. ‘Nothing is too good for God,’ His Eminence would say, only to have some parish priest retort without respect (and employing some
nauseatingly stereotypical formula), that, ‘Loving one’s neighbour is a matter of praxis.’ His Eminence recalled without nostalgia the bitter arguments that had so often degenerated into unecclesiastical personal insult as he had dismissed a poor priest as a ‘slogan-monger’ only to be dubbed in return ‘an oligarchic parasite whose fat belly is full of the bread of the lowly’.

He remembered his early years when life in the Church had been one of tranquillity and routine, a kind of dreamlike state perfumed with incense and lulled with chant. He remembered how he had, one by one, got rid of his turbulent clergy. There had been that one who had left anyway, and had got killed in a skirmish when the National Army had surprised a party of Communists; and there was Don Ramón, who he had browbeaten in repeated interviews until he had forced a promise that he would never again allow a political opinion to pass his lips.

Nowadays there were no parish priests with donkeys and wooden crucifixes. Instead there were plump, jolly priests who drove land-cruisers, who wore gold rings inlaid with the cross, and everything was to his satisfaction, except that when he suffered agony like this, the other side of the argument always presented itself to him, and he recalled that in many villages there were no priests at all anymore. In those places people made a cult of the Black Virgin, begging her intercession even in the most un-Christian projects, and there was no sanctioned marriage; men got women pregnant and then disappeared, leaving behind them improbable matriarchies with no conception of the Fatherhood of God. It was at times like this that His Eminence felt the burden of all the contention that had sundered his ministry and which made him wonder if in his certainties he had not been altogether too inflexible.

After the Contending Heads came the leathery creature with five legs that he knew as the Hinderer, tripping everybody up, raising instantaneous and invisible walls that all the others crashed into, so that the dreadful procession compressed itself into a concertina of flailing limbs and obscene imprecations.

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