The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (19 page)

The smell from the river contained something new. What was it? He tested the air with his nose. It was the smell of corpses. Perhaps that was why Concepcion had given him a new medicine to protect him from ‘qhayqa’, a disease of which he had never heard, and which she said was caused by the stench of death. No doubt something had been washed up on the banks.

Mgr Rechin Anquilar knocked on the door as he entered in order to draw attention to his presence, and came forward to kiss the Cardinal’s ring. ‘I am very late again, for which I apologise, Your Eminence. I have just seen a most sanguine thing, and that was what delayed me.’

‘O?’

‘Yes, indeed, I regret to say. The traffic jams are so bad these days, as you know, and there are many people selling things to the drivers of the stationary vehicles. I was in such a jam, and the car in front of me was a government limousine carrying the national flag upon the wing. And there was a man selling the latest Amado novel. But when the limousine drew level, the man dropped the books and drew a revolver and fired into it twice. He ran off, and there was mayhem.’

‘Terrible, terrible,’ murmured the Cardinal.

‘I would have been on time, but my robes drew attention to me, and a traffic policeman demanded that I deliver extreme unction to the Justice Minister.’

‘That is our third Justice Minister this year,’ exclaimed the Cardinal incredulously. ‘The work of the cartels no doubt. Is the poor man dead?’

‘Yes, I am sorry to say, but one is tempted all the same to perceive the hand of God. The man was not only a Liberal but a secularist. Avowedly so.’

‘Monsignor, one should not perceive any such thing in an assassination. I must reprove you.’

Mgr Anquilar maintained silence in order to indicate disagreement, and tapped his briefcase. ‘Would you like to hear how our enterprise is proceeding?’

The Cardinal seated himself and indicated to the other that he
should follow suit. The briefcase was opened, and a thin sheaf of paper extracted, which was then shuffled into order and placed upon the desk between them.

‘Firstly, we have despatched missionaries in pairs to all those places indicated by the report of the Holy Office as being in need of spiritual renewal. The missionaries were volunteers who were then vetted by us for rectitude, zeal, and theological orthodoxy. In this way, Your Eminence, we were able to weed out those amongst them who were tempted by the prospect of a lengthy holiday.’

‘Very good, very good. Most wise. Well done. And have they prospered?’

‘I am afraid, Your Eminence, that most of them have encountered extreme hostility, amounting in some cases to severe mistreatment. Perhaps I could give you an example?’

‘Indeed, I should be most interested.’

‘We sent two fathers to Rinconondo, where there is a heresy which states that Mohammed was a reincarnation of Our Lord, who had returned in order to lose his virginity. They arrived in the town and proceeded to the plaza, where they preached a sermon against this belief. They then held an auto de fe, where they burned, amongst other things, several copies of the Koran, a Protestant Bible, a set of the philosophical works of Ortega y Gasset, a book by Paulo Freire that had belonged to the schoolteacher, and various different novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who, as you know, has been associated with the atheistical experiments of Fidel Castro . . .’

‘Monsignor, there should be no burnings of books. There has been no
index librorum prohibitorum
since 1966. We have no authority to burn books.’

‘I understand that it was done on a voluntary basis by those who were convinced by the sermon, Your Eminence.’

‘I see. Continue.’

‘But then things apparently turned very nasty, and there was a display by some antisocial elements who stoned the fathers, beat them, and drove them out of the town.’

The Cardinal’s brow knitted with concern. ‘How appalling. What has been done about it? Were the police informed?’

‘The police were apparently present, and turned a blind eye. We are contemplating sending in six priests next time, so that a
repetition of this violence may be avoided, and we are adopting similar measures where other such unfortunate and ungodly incidents have occurred.’

‘Very laudable, I congratulate you. It seems that you are admirably fulfilling our trust. Do not forget to submit your accounts to my secretary, and I shall see you again in two weeks. Until then, keep up the good work, and God go with you.’

Startled by the brevity of the interview, Mgr Anquilar gathered together his notes and left, feeling as though he had been slighted. Back in the audience chamber His Eminence spread his hands across his tautly expanding belly, and doubled over with the anguish. He heard the scuffling of leathery feet, the ribald shouts of laughter. He caught the metallic tang of the scent of ancient tombs, and he closed his eyes in order not to have to watch the rout of demons that mocked him in his torment.

Outside the intermittent but perpetual rain of the capital resumed, and the cadaverous perfume of the air was washed down onto the streets, where it filled the sewers and nauseated the population of discarded children who had found their home there.

INCANDESCENT WITH RIGHTEOUS
enthusiasm and insured against fallibility by the spiritual authority of the Church, Fathers Valentino and Lorenzo arrived in Rinconondo right at the beginning of siesta, when the sun of the llanos was vertically above and in a particularly unmerciful frame of mind. There was no breeze whatsoever, the birds were falling stone dead from their perches in the ceiba trees, and the cattle were wishing that they were elephants so that they could hose themselves down in the river. A confusing haze of dancing veils hovered over the red earth, and an engaging mirage of palm trees sprouted casually from the roof of the alcaldia. Nocturnal bats sortied from their roosts in the hollow trees and swooped along the surface of the ponds, risking suicide in the quest for water, and lemons ripened in minutes in the citrus groves. The fleas on the town’s dogs hopped away into the shade, and the human inhabitants were overwhelmed with a lassitude very like a hangover. They had unanimously retired in order to snore away the afternoon in their hammocks.

Fathers Lorenzo and Valentino, despite the inferno, could not wait to commence their mission. They stationed themselves beneath a tree in the plaza, and began to ring a handbell in order to draw attention to themselves. When nothing happened, they rang the bell even louder, and started to clamour in unison, ‘Hear the Word of The Lord, ye faithless, and repent.’

The mayor of Rinconondo stirred irritably awake. He blocked his ears with his hands, a movement that made him sweat profusely and which he immediately regretted, and tried to resume his dream at the place where he was about to undress Silvia, the winsome daughter of one of his policemen. But the terrible racket intervened once more at exactly the point when she inexplicably transmogrified into an iguana, and he sat up in his hammock and swore bitterly. He strapped on his holster and went into the neighbouring room, where his two policemen were similarly awake and cursing.

The three men crept swiftly down the street, ducking from one piece of shade to another, and emerged into the crushing light of the plaza at the same time as several irate citizens who had also suffered a shattering of their nerves and been aroused from their prostration. A guava described an elegant arc through the air and exploded gratifyingly against the habit of Father Lorenzo.

The mayor set his stubbled chin in determination and strode forward. ‘We have a law,’ he said, ‘that there is to be no noise during siesta. Under this law I am empowered to ensure that you immediately desist, on pain of arrest for conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace, and I may also confiscate your bell and fine you.’

Father Valentino replied, ‘We obey a higher law,’ and Father Lorenzo, trying a different tack, said, ‘Show me where this law is written.’

The mayor sighed, and gestured towards everyone present. ‘It is a common law, assented to by everyone here, and it has no need to be written. Either be silent until after four o’clock, or I shall arrest you.’

The two priests, undeterred, and determined to show that salvation is of greater import than peace, looked at one another and with one voice defiantly resumed their chant. Father Lorenzo gave a loud peal of his bell, and jumped sideways as a bullet skipped off the earth by his left foot. The mayor pointed his pistol directly at them and announced, ‘Until four o’clock you are under arrest, and your bell is declared confiscated and the property of the town. It shall be given to the school. And you are very lucky; if you had not been priests it would have been the death penalty.’

The priests were led away, protesting vociferously and prophesying hellfire, and were locked away for the afternoon in the school-house. Here they sang hymns, said the rosary, and compared themselves to St Paul. When the doors failed to spring open of their own accord, their jubilant indignation turned gradually to boredom, and they began to take up the time by leafing through the books that the schoolteacher had spent years accumulating in order to form the nexus of a school library. Father Valentino read
Little Red Riding-Hood
, followed by a story about a porcupine who had lost his spines, and Father Lorenzo brushed up on his basic English with the aid of a venerable book that advised him upon the sense and usage of such sentences and phrases as ‘Inclement weather for the time of year’, and
‘I am taking my dog to the vet.’ Then they chanced upon the section that the teacher kept for herself, and discovered much to horrify them.

Rinconondo had been transformed many years before by the arrival of ‘Syrians’; this word was used to denote anyone who was a trader originally from somewhere in the Middle East, and by extension had come to mean a muslim. The very first Syrian was a man appropriately named Mohammed, who had arrived with a handcart laden with leather bags, silver trinkets, and aphrodisiacs of doubtful provenance. He had at first puzzled the people by his manner of banging his forehead upon the ground when praying whilst facing east, the direction in which one commonly orients the head of a lamb before slaughter. They had been impressed by his robes and his statement that where he came from the llamas were twice as big. This boast caused some to suspect that he might be a Yanqui in disguise.

Then his wife and numerous relatives had appeared as if from nowhere, and set up a small colony of their own in one large house on the plaza. The people assumed that the wife must be disfigured because she always concealed her face, but Mohammed explained that the purpose of this was to spare her harrassment on account of her beauty, and to prevent other men from suffering the pangs of adulterous lust. Naturally, all the men began to long for a glimpse of her face, and as the years went by the veil slipped further and lower until the Syrians no longer noticed that it was absent and the male populace forgot their prurient speculations.

For the lack of a priest or an imam the purity of their faiths became diluted. The families intermarried and muddled themselves up; children were christened as Abdul and Fatima, some Islamic laws became incorporated into local custom, Lent and Ramadan became conflated, Christians made statuettes of the Prophet, and Muslims wore crosses about their necks. Some men took two or three wives, which made sense in view of the fact that they died younger and more often than women and were seemingly incapable of monogamous fidelity, and songsters incorporated muezzin-like wails and ululations into the garbled hymns handed down by their fathers.

All this was made infinitely easier by the fact that almost no one could read, which meant that it was only a matter of time before nobody could remember which story was about Jesus and which was
about Mohammed; it was as if the wisdom of both were married seamlessly into one spiritual garment.

And then Ricardo the Goatherd received a visit whilst he was tending his goats near the waterfall. Ricardo was perhaps a little simple, or, to put it more kindly, a Holy Innocent. He was almost incapable of speech, suffered from a kind of palsy that gave him a violent twitch of the neck, and was in no way equipped to care for himself. But he did have a praeternatural gift for working with animals, and was thus assured of a vital rôle in that rural community, where dogs would one day unaccountably begin to chew their own tails, or cows would labour for days and bring forth prodigies with two heads and copious but redundant sets of genitals.

Ricardo was sitting in the shade eating a plantain fried in batter, when a shape began to form itself in the rainbow of colours created by the spray of the waterfall. He watched the vision out of one eye, and with the other he continued to guard the goats. The figure divided itself into three, and Ricardo could clearly see that it was Mary herself, flanked by two male figures, upon each of whose shoulders she had laid a maternal hand. ‘Watch,’ she commanded, and the figures of Mohammed and Jesus passed in front of her and became one. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘this is my son who returned because no man has understood love until he has known it in every form.’ She made Ricardo repeat what she had said, and it was not until afterwards that he realised that his palsy had gone and he had spoken his first complete sentence.

Ricardo deserted his flock and ran into the plaza, his eyes glowing with healing and with the benediction of his revelation. His miraculous cure confirmed to one and all that his vision had not been the hallucination of a simpleton, and it took only a very little exegesis to work out (perhaps erroneously) that Jesus had returned as Mohammed in order to experience the love of women. The people erected statues beneath the waterfall depicting the event, which at the time caused some bad feeling amongst those Muslims who believed that one should not portray the human form, but which became eventually a popular local shrine where one might pray, meditate, or await minor miracles.

Fathers Lorenzo and Valentino found on the shelves of the schoolroom the teacher’s clumsily typewritten account of the
theophany, they found some Korans translated apologetically into Castilian, and they found a volume of letters by Camilo Torres, the priest who had embraced Marxism and become an instant martyr owing to a misplaced act of futile heroism. Clicking their tongues with righteous disgust, they made a pile of the books by the door, and awaited their release at four o’clock.