The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (17 page)

It is very likely that if he had not paralysed the administration of the country by his absence, then the events recounted here would never have happened. True, he left the government to his cabinet, but they never knew what to do, and took to consulting the United States Ambassador, who from time immemorial had always been nicknamed ‘The Real President’. But no one in the country had the constitutional power to declare an emergency or to mobilise the Armed Forces, and the only guidance from His Excellency was a directive telegraphed from Italy that henceforth all citizens must wear a hat, so that they could doff it in the event of meeting him unexpectedly.

‘
SHALL I WIPE
that snot from your nose, Cristobal?’ asked the Cardinal, and the little boy replied, ‘No, it’s all right, I’ll eat it.’

Before His Eminence could stop him, Cristobal had spread the mucus on the back of his hand and removed it with one efficient sweep of his tongue. ‘Yum,’ he said. ‘It’s salty.’

‘Cristobal, that is horrible, you really must not do it,’ remonstrated His Eminence, and the little boy reflected a moment. Ingenuously he raised his eyes and observed, ‘I saw a dog licking itself, that’s not very nice, is it?’

‘No it is not,’ said His Eminence, amused, ‘but they only do that because they have no sponges and soap.’

‘Or hands,’ said the little boy. ‘Mama says that if I am bad I will be reborn as a dog, and then I’ll have to lick myself, won’t I? What do you think it’s like?’

‘Mama should not tell you things like that. When you die you go to heaven if you have been good, and to hell if you have been bad.’

Cristobal sent a toy car rattling across the polished tiles, and it collided with the leg of a table. ‘O Jesus,’ he exclaimed in his innocent treble. The Cardinal was shocked and raised his voice a little: ‘Don’t say that. God does not like people to call him when they don’t need to. One day you will call him and he won’t come because he is fed up with false alarms.’

‘Mama says it all the time. She said it when I had that accident and she had to change my clothes, and she says it when you ring the bell to ask for something.’

His Eminence shook his head sadly, and Cristobal returned to his earlier topic. ‘When I die I want to be a hummingbird.’

‘Maybe God will let you be a hummingbird for some of the time when you get to heaven.’ He paused. ‘But you won’t get there at all if you keep saying bad things.’

‘Mama says that heaven would be boring. She says that all the interesting people go to hell.’

The Cardinal raised his eyes to the heavens and instructed himself to have a word with Concepcion. ‘But if you go to heaven or hell you can’t come back as a dog or a hummingbird, can you? So you must have been wrong about that.’

‘You stay there for a bit, and then you come back as soon as there is a body waiting.’

‘Your mama says that?’

Cristobal nodded sagely, and the Cardinal decided to change the subject. ‘Will you clear up all these toys now? I am expecting a visitor and I don’t want him to fall over and see all this mess. Put everything in a box and take it away.’

The little boy stuck his lower lip out in protest, and His Eminence said, ‘That’s how Indians point, by sticking their lip out, did you know that? Come on, I’ll help.’ His Eminence got down on his hands and knees and fished toys out from under the chairs, passing them to his illegitimate but dearly beloved son. Cristobal played briefly with each one before putting it in the big wooden box that His Eminence kept in a corner, covered with a cloth. The Cardinal returned to his chair and pulled out a handkerchief from beneath his robes. ‘Come and sit on my knee a minute, Cristo’. Come and give me a hug.’

Cristobal climbed up the Cardinal’s legs and kissed him wetly on the cheek. ‘Are you my papa?’ he asked. ‘Everyone says that you are, except you and Mama.’

‘I am your spiritual father,’ said His Eminence gently, ‘and I love you just as much as if I was your real father.’ He stroked the boy’s curls and squeezed softly at the back of his neck. ‘Will you tell Mama that her fish was delicious? And will you tell her that I would love some of her tea that is good for my stomach? And guess what I can see?’

‘What?’ asked Cristobal, following the line of his father’s finger. The Cardinal deftly wiped the boy’s upper lip with the concealed handkerchief and said teasingly, ‘I saw two horrible green slugs coming out of your nose, but now they are gone. What do you think of that?’

Cristobal looked aggrieved. ‘Can I lick the handkerchief?’ he demanded.

His father pulled a face and said, ‘Certainly not. Now go and play in the gardens, and don’t forget to tell your mama what I said about
the fish and the tea.’ He patted Cristobal’s backside as he clambered down, and watched him run happily out of the audience chamber. He sighed and leaned back in his chair, intending to run over in his mind the things he was going to say to Monsignor Anquilar, but instead he thought about the sadness of being locked into a life that was nothing but unworthy compromise. In the distance he heard two gunshots that were the failed assassination attempt upon a visiting judge, and he went to the window. He spotted the group of pious widows before they spotted him, and he ducked back so that he would not have to bless them. The stench of urine was as bad as ever. There was a pall of smoke somewhere in the centre of the city where the coca cartels had blown up the police headquarters an hour previously, and he reflected upon the artistic way in which it blended with the first dark clouds of sunset. He practised what he was going to say when the press asked him to release a statement about these atrocities. All the usual words like ‘inhuman’ and ‘barbarous’ came to his mind, and he groped about for something more telling and original.

Concepcion came in with the medicinal tea, and he turned and smiled, ‘Thank you, querida, just put it on the desk and I will come and drink it in a moment.’

‘Ahorita,’ said Concepcion, using the diminutive of the word ‘now’ that is used by everyone from mountainous regions. ‘You have to drink it very hot, or it is no use.’

The Cardinal came to the desk and took a sip of the tea. It tasted exotic and bitter, but not unpleasant, and he took a deeper draught. ‘Where do you find this?’ he asked. ‘It’s not one of those barbarous country medicines is it?’

Concepcion shot him a reproving glance and said, ‘Tchaa, I got it from the pharmacy,’ thinking that on this occasion a lie would be tactful. The tea was made of coca leaves, yague, a drop of copal resin, some of her own urine, and desiccated llama foetus, with a little bit of ordinary tea thrown in to disguise it. She had got the recipe from the brujo up in the favelas that the Cardinal was trying to get removed.

‘It does me good,’ said His Eminence, ‘you take good care of me.’

‘I love you,’ she said, and shrugged her shoulders to indicate that
that explained everything. They smiled at each other for a moment, and she gathered up the tray and left. ‘She is like a cat,’ he thought.

Very shortly afterwards, Monsignor Rechin Anquilar arrived, bearing a brittle smile and the gift of a missal inlaid with mother-of-pearl. As though by a flick of a switch, the Cardinal clicked out of his role as father and lover, and became every inch the primate. He grew stiffer, his movements more dignified and considered, and his smile more reluctant. He adopted a serious and apostolic air, and waved Mgr Anquilar to a seat with a balletic sweep of the arm and a slight bow. ‘How pleasant it is to meet you,’ he said, ‘I trust that you are well.’

Mgr Anquilar nodded, and sat down without any discernible expression upon his face. ‘I am late,’ he said in his dry voice. ‘It was because of the traffic jams. There has been another bombing.’

The Cardinal expected him to continue his explanation, to make lamentation about what terrible times we live in, or to say something more about the traffic, but Mgr Rechin Anquilar merely placed his hands upon his lap and looked at him in a vacant but direct fashion. His Eminence was to discover that Anquilar was taciturn and humourless.

‘Read this,’ said His Eminence, handing over the report of the Holy Office, ‘but ignore the scurrilous attacks on the Church and the pieces composed by Communists.’ His Eminence noticed that somehow Cristobal had left guava-jelly fingerprints upon it, and hoped that Anquilar would not notice and think it was him. He sat back and watched as the man read it carefully, flicking over the pages with the impatience of a man who is morally irritated. He took the opportunity to gather a first impression of he whom he was intending to appoint as the leader of the crusade of preaching.

He was a man so angular that he seemed to be composed entirely of polyhedra, and had the kind of nose that people assume to be Jewish but which in fact is aristocratically Spanish. His black habit concealed a bony body, and fell about him in such a fashion that it seemed to be a part of him. His Eminence read again his accreditation; he was forty years old, had a doctorate in Canon Law and another in the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas. He had lectured in France and in Uruguay, and was a noted authority upon the ontological argument for the existence of God. He had successfully evangelised the
population of the Island of Baru, but had seen his work overthrown by a catastrophic outbreak of influenza caused by the arrival of a new missionary from Holland, and he was widely notorious for his inflexible orthodoxy. His report upon the Baru Island fiasco had concluded with the words, ‘And so we find ourselves edified by the unshakeable belief that the islanders found their way to heaven earlier than they otherwise would have done, it being better for them to have died prematurely as Christians than at full term as heathens.’ Here was a man who would jump at the chance to transform the nation.

‘What do you think?’ asked His Eminence when Mgr Anquilar had reached the last lines of the report.

‘It is just as I would have expected,’ he replied. ‘The spiritual poverty of the people is everywhere evident.’

‘I want you to do something about it,’ said His Eminence.

‘My life is already dedicated to that task,’ said Anquilar. ‘I hope that you have not found me deficient.’

‘Far from it,’ said His Eminence, rattled by the man’s dusty voice and dry demeanour. ‘My plan is to mount a crusade of evangelisation that will bring the lost sheep back into the fold, and I want you to shepherd it. I would expect you to submit accounts, but beyond that you would enjoy great autonomy. I expect you to gather together a band of men of great faith and resourcefulness who would be prepared to endure hostility and ridicule in order to bring the people back to God, and to send them to the most obscure corners of the land to drive out the Devil, so to speak.’

‘So to speak?’ echoed Anquilar. ‘I take the Devil literally.’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ said the Cardinal. ‘Now, will you take on the job?’

Mgr Rechin Anquilar reflected for a moment and then nodded. ‘I will do God’s will in the belief that it is transmitted via your office.’

His Eminence took this as it was intended, as a slight, since Anquilar had drawn attention to the distinction between a man and the office he holds. He stood up stiffly and extended his hand. Anquilar’s felt bloodless, and he did not shake it for long. ‘
Dominus tecum
,’ he said.

Anquilar returned his gaze as if through smoked glass. ‘
Et cum spiritu tuo
,’ he responded, and the Cardinal watched him go with a
sensation of apprehension in his soul. After putting his great design into motion he felt strangely empty. ‘
Kyrie, eleison
,’ he muttered, and put his hands to his stomach. Either he was putting on weight, or his affliction was making his belly swell.

IN COCHADEBAJO DE
los Gatos these was a plague of reading more insidious even than the great plague of laughing, the whimsical plague of cats, or the swinish plague of peccaries.

You could either borrow a book from Dionisio’s by leaving a deposit for surety, or you could buy one outright. To this end he published a table of equivalents, setting out the price of books in the following form: 1 book = 10 mangoes = half a chicken or duck = 1 guinea pig = 20 apples = 4 pepino melons or 2 large ones = 6 grenadillos = 1 steak of llama, vicuña, sheep, pig or cow = 6 papaya (not too ripe) = 2 packs of large native cigars = 1 worn out machete ground down to make a knife = 8 roots of cassava = 3 kilos of potatoes or 2 kilos of sweet potatoes = the loan of a mule for two days = 2 decent-sized edible fish without too many bones = 3 bunches of eating bananas or 4 of cooking platanos. Any other offers at proprietor’s discretion. NO YAMS, BREADFRUIT, ALCOHOL, STOLEN PROPERTY OR BULLETS.

Having the advantage of a fixed rate of exchange for real things rather than the floating rate of coin and paper representing something imaginary, this novel form of currency, unaffected by 200 per cent inflation as was the peso, almost replaced the latter and completely superseded those promissory notes issued by guerrillas in the past ‘to be redeemed after the revolution’. With time Dionisio’s table of equivalents became expanded to the point where it grew beyond anybody’s power to memorise, and conventions arose, such as that an almost ripe tomato was worth a third more than a green one or one that was so ripe that it was only any good for putting in a Portuguese sauce.

Far worse than any confusion ever caused by the new currency was the furore caused by Dionisio’s apparently innocent sale of all one hundred copies of
Doña Barbara.
In a town where television was an impossibility owing to the twelve-volt electrical supply and the absence of aerials, where the main source of stories was Aurelio’s
recounting of myths and legends and the reconstruction of memories in bars, the books filled a gap in people’s lives that they had not hitherto perceived to be there at all.

A great hush descended, broken only by the braying of mules, the barking of dogs, the coughs and yowls of the jaguars as they ambushed each other, and the unrelenting drone of Father Garcia preaching to no one in particular in the plaza. The habit of literacy being unconsolidated, the hush lasted for an entire week whilst brows furrowed and lips silently repeated the text. Work stopped, or those working would cut alfalfa with the book in the left hand whilst the machete in the right swept aimlessly over the same spot. People read walking down the street, treading on the jaguars’ tails and tripping over the kerbs, bumping into each other and forgetting to go and eat what their spouses had failed to cook because it had burned unstirred in its pot.