The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (15 page)

The members of the cabinet exchanged resigned glances; ‘Your Excellency, may I remind you that East and West Germany are nowadays one country?’ It was the Minister for Foreign Affairs, a huge, suave man in a velvet smoking-jacket, who had been humorously appointed to that office because his wife was Norwegian and his mistress was French.

His Excellency appeared to be disconcerted by this news. Wearily he passed his hand over his brow. ‘Truly,’ he said, ‘one is so busy these days that one’s job prevents one from keeping up with events. This must be the reason why the East German Ambassador no longer comes to official functions and has ceased to send me gifts of inedible sausages.’

‘Why do we not just have the ballot boxes filled in advance, as we did last time?’ asked Emperador, who for notorious reasons always smelled of anchovies.

‘There was a scandal last time, when the number of voters turned
out to be three times the number of the population,’ replied His Excellency, ‘and in any case, I seem to detect that times are changing. I mean, these days one has to do it right. One cannot occupy the moral high ground against the coca people, and then go and lose it because of corruption scandals.’

‘What we need is a few coups,’ observed the Minister for Foreign Affairs. His Excellency appeared extremely shocked, and the Minister hastily added, ‘I mean, Your Excellency, that undemocratic coups always increase the popularity of democratic governments. Is there no young colonel who could stage an abortive foco in return for a little something?’

‘We’ve shot ourselves in the foot here,’ interjected the Minister for Internal Affairs. ‘Ever since we appointed General Hernando Montes Sosa to be chief of the General Staff it has become impossible to do things of this kind. He has established absolute discipline in the Armed Services and thrown out all the troublemakers. No one will do anything without his permission, and he won’t do anything without ours.’

‘Damn,’ exclaimed the President, who had appointed the man for precisely the reasons that were now proving an obstacle. ‘Maybe we can try the Communists.’

‘There would be more chance with a Conservative,’ said Emperador. ‘There are fourteen Communist parties of different complexions now, and it is damned hard to find one of the old Stalinist school. They have all turned into soggy Liberals.’

‘We are the Liberals,’ said His Excellency stiffly.

‘No one is suggesting that we are soggy, though,’ said Emperador hastily. ‘I suggest that we ask the Minister of the Interior to find a Conservative to do it.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said the aforementioned minister, who was the token female in the political set-up, and had resolved to keep her place by being even more devious, mendacious, brown-nosed and calculating than the men. The people used to refer to her as ‘Eva Perón’ on account of her dubious antecedents and her penchant for populist escapades. She was to be seen almost daily in the newspapers, kissing stray dogs, weeping eloquently at the scenes of mining disasters, or shaking a proferred stump of the non-contagious variety of leper. ‘But,’ said Eva, ‘why not simply pretend that there has been a coup
attempt? It would be cheap, simple, non-dangerous. All one has to do is release a statement to the press, and then His Excellency can go on television and say something sobering about it, and then I can go on television saying how he heroically saved us by tackling the armed man in person, and then Emperador can go on television and say that it was the Conservatives. Then we can look at the polls, and if our popularity is high we can start the election immediately, but if it is not high enough we can declare a state of emergency so that we can delay a little . . .’

‘Señora, if I may interrupt, I agree entirely with this notable plan, but I propose that we declare a state of emergency in any case, but still go ahead with the elections on the grounds that we cannot countenance even an emergency interfering with the due processes of democracy. I think that would impress the electorate most favourably.’

‘Very good, Emperador,’ said His Excellency, ‘our slogan will be “Democracy is Safe in Our Hands”.’

As it was decided, so it happened. The Ambassador in the United States went to a joke and novelty shop to purchase a packet of realistic adhesive bullet-holes such as one finds on the windscreens of the cars of the young men of that country, and sent them home in the diplomatic bag. His Excellency personally stuck them onto the presidential limousine, and appeared on television looking both calm and dignified. Eva Perón appeared on the news and, her eyes shining with admiration, explained how His Excellency had thwarted the gunman by wrestling the weapon from his grasp, whereupon the would-be assassin had taken to his heels. Emperador Ignacio Coriolano appeared on television to announce that in his opinion it was part of a Conservative anti-democractic conspiracy to eliminate the principal electoral asset of the Liberal Party. His Excellency announced a state of emergency and simultaneously proclaimed the election for the twelfth of June.

All at once the Conservatives, funded by industry and by covert donations from the Church, countered by erecting enormous placards all over the country. They depicted His Excellency and Eva Perón with cartoon bubbles coming out of their mouths. Eva was saying, ‘What did we have in this country before we had candles?’ and His Excellency was saying, ‘Electricity.’

What was most discomfiting and wounding about this was that it was largely true. Out of the kindness of their hearts the Norwegians had constructed a miraculous system of hydroelectric plants that in theory would not only have supplied enough electricity to cater for the country as it was, but would also have been sufficient to power His Excellency’s plans for industrial expansion. But there had been that business about the abduction of Regina Olsen during the time of the disappearances, which had caused so much diplomatic friction with Norway that when all the projects were completed the Norwegians had refused to stay behind and help run the power stations that they had built. All the indigenous electrical engineers had migrated to Brazil to help on the giant dam on the border with Paraguay, and would not come back to work on the pitiful wages offered by the government, and so the running of the turbines was left to people who would have had difficulty in wiring a plug and screwing in a lightbulb. Furthermore, there was a guerrilla group inspired by the Sendero Luminoso who were dedicated to bringing progress and the liberation of the masses, a project they deemed to be best achieved by the expedient of blowing up powerlines and pylons. In this way it was hoped that the proletariat could be brought forth out of the darkness by being plunged into it, and the power-cut became a way of life.

People very quickly realised that the redundant poles snaking their way over the landscape were marvellously suited to the building of bridges and water-towers, and that the cables were excellent for melting down and casting into statuettes for the tourist market in the capital. In this way the cables were exported, many of them, no doubt, back to Norway. The nation’s lightbulbs were unscrewed from their sockets and used instead of bottles for target practice, and the flex in the houses ended up holding the doors onto people’s cars. Electrical frigidaires and ovens became henhouses, and the turbines that were left were burned out by having nowhere to send their electricity. The great dams in the mountains settled into decrepitude, awaiting the
coup de grâce
in the form of an earthquake or a titanic explosion by courtesy of the guerrillas. The nation settled back into the comfortable routine of trimming wicks and keeping things cool in porous earthenware pots. Community life was maintained by the
installation of televisions in bars and village halls, powered, as they had always been, by generators.

His Excellency caused to be erected some giant billboards of his own. They were in the style of socialist realism, and depicted a healthy-looking worker asking a blonde young woman, ‘What should we have instead of Conservatives?’ and the young woman was replying, ‘Idealists.’ The Conservatives continued this war of riddles by putting up more of their own. This one showed His Excellency in an Uncle Sam costume with dollars sticking out of his ears, his nose and mouth unmistakably streaked with excrement, and underneath a woman was asking a man, ‘What should we have instead of an arselicker?’ She was being answered by Lopez, leader of the Conservatives, dressed in the colours of the flag, who was saying, ‘A Patriot.’

His Excellency was irritated to the core, and also outraged. He was outraged because everyone knew that the Conservatives were partly funded from Washington, and he was irritated because he had been intending to play the anti-gringo card himself, a sure election-winner if ever there was one. For three days he stormed about the Presidential Palace, smacking his fist into his palm and exclaiming, ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ until he suddenly had some good ideas all at once, and threw the whole party into a propaganda offensive.

LEAVING HIS TWO
black jaguars behind to be tended by Farides and Profesor Luis, Dionisio set off on foot to the little village of Santa Maria Virgen. Having learned to cover enormous distances of difficult terrain by walking slowly, he arrived there before noon and accepted a tinto from the people in the first house. ‘How everything has changed,’ he remarked to the old man who brought him the coffee. The two men looked along the street towards the plaza, and the old man smiled, revealing three crooked yellow teeth. In a voice cracked by tobacco and the thin air, the old man made an expansive gesture and said, ‘Ay, ay, it is just as it was before, when I was young and getting girls pregnant behind the cemetery wall.’

Dionisio smiled. ‘You were not so bad as that, viejo.’

‘But he tried to be,’ exclaimed the old man’s wife, who had not been able to resist eavesdropping behind the door, where she had been hanging a string of salted fish.

The old man pretended to be exasperated; he waved his arms again, saying, ‘Ay, these women, it is their vocation to hold out the prospect of pleasure, and then to deny it and delay it until you are defeated and go back to your goats.’

‘You are an old goat,’ she said. ‘You belong with them.’

‘To get back to the subject,’ said Dionisio, ‘I notice that the street is swept and the houses have been whitewashed. Even the chickens look healthy.’

‘El Jerarca is dead,’ observed the old woman, ‘and that is the explanation. In the time of cocaine he was a plague all to himself. When we went back to chewing the leaves, everything went back to the way it was before.’

When Dionisio shook hands and walked away towards the choza belonging to the two girls, the old woman held up her hand and muttered, ‘God bless the Deliverer.’ Then she returned towards her husband and struck him across the side of the head. ‘I never did deny you pleasure, after we were married.’

The old man said, ‘We never were married.’ Whereupon the old woman was silent for a moment’s reflection. ‘A good thing too,’ she replied. ‘I couldn’t have stood being married to you all this time.’

Dionisio went to find his car, and discovered that it had been decorated with white flowers. He was looking at it wonderingly when the two girls came out. One of them touched his arm respectfully, and said, ‘It is two years that you killed El Jerarca.’ Dionisio sighed, half wishing that life could be rewritten. He kissed them both upon the cheek and said, ‘I have to take the car today, and I fear that the flowers will soon be lost.’

Ines, the younger of the two, shrugged and smiled. ‘That is in the nature of flowers.’ She ran inside and brought out a slab of guava jelly wrapped in palm leaf ‘for the journey’, which he took with thanks. Rather than trouble the aged battery he cranked the car to life, and the girls cried ‘Whooba’ and clapped their hands at the aromatic cloud of blue smoke that shot from the exhaust and whipped away with the dust devils down the side of the mountain.

Dionisio drove into his old home town of Ipasueño and parked in the plaza. Behind him the road to Santa Maria Virgen was strewn with white flowers, an unexpected bonus for the trains of mules carrying alfalfa, bootlaces, clockwork toys, imitation baseball caps, and tambos of coca leaves compressed into cheek-sized wads.

In response to his fame Dionisio had perfected the art of inconspicuousness. It was not that he became invisible, as everybody said, but that he would walk in such away that nobody noticed his presence until after he had already gone, giving rise to the popular misconception that he was a ghost. He walked first to the Barrio Jerarca, and noticed that it had become shabby, but that the atmosphere of menace had disappeared. He paused beneath the lamppost where they had suspended Pablo Ecobandodo’s body, and saw that the gilded church was peeling and becoming lopsided. He was pleased at such decay, because the splendour of its past had been created with coca money; it had been a shameful splendour at the price of human blood, and as everybody knows, the evils of the cocaine trade are not the consequence of poverty but of wealth.

He went to the police station and asked for Agustin. The young policeman came out and shook his hand, embracing him, and noting with pleasure that Dionisio still had Ramón’s gun, saying, ‘Dio’, I
really ought to take that back from you. It is police property, and so it is fortunate that I have not noticed it.’

‘Nonetheless,’ replied Dionisio, ‘it brings you something,’ and he removed the medicine-bottle cork from the barrel and shook out a thin cigar, giving it to Agustin. ‘In memory of Ramón; it is for you, if you will let me use the police telephone for nothing.’

Agustin laughed wryly. ‘I shall arrest you for attempting to bribe a police officer, and then I shall discharge you if you will come out and take a copa with me. The telephone is in there.’

Dionisio rang up the offices of La Oveja Blanca, ‘publishers of books in the area of the countries of the Castilian idiom’, immediately causing a flurry of activity by giving his name and asking to speak to the Sales Manager, who promptly came to the telephone, begging to be of service. When Dionisio explained that he wanted any surplus of good books that they had been unable to sell, remainders of old editions, editions damaged but readable, the Sales Manager, after recovering from his surprise, said that they had a large stock of
Doña Barbara
by Romulo Gallegos; ‘We brought it out thinking that the copyright was finished, and then we discovered that a company in Venezuela still had the rights, and therefore we could not sell it . . . you want me to send one hundred copies to Ipasueña Police Station? Are you serious? . . . OK, you are serious, I apologise, I was taken by surprise . . . Yes, OK. I will send anything else there from time to time that is not cheap romances and other rubbish . . . respectfully, Señor Vivo, we do not publish any rubbish.’ Then the Sales Manager asked for a little something in return, and Dionisio listened to what it was. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is alright with me if you use the slogan “Dionisio Vivo endorses our books”, but you cannot use the slogan to endorse any rubbish . . . yes, I know that you publish no rubbish, but if by any chance you find yourself doing so, you cannot use my name to advertise it, OK?’