The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (20 page)

When the police came to unlock the door, the fathers acted with duplicitious humility. They asked for pardon, and begged to be shown the shrine by the waterfall. The mayor, in a more expansive mood on account of the cooling of the day, offered to take them there himself, and they duly admired it, offered up a prayer or two, and generally made themselves amiable and tractable. The mayor grew suspicious, but nonetheless arranged overnight accommodation for them in the alcaldia, whereupon the fathers declared their intention to call in on every house before bedtime, in a spirit of reconcilation.

They found very few houses with books, but in those where they found them, one or other of them would manage to spirit away the objectionable ones into the folds of their voluminous cowls. In this way they removed the volumes of Ortega y Gasset, several Korans, the Protestant Bible, the Marquez novels, and the book about teaching the poor by Paulo Freire. They furthermore collected the pile of books they had made in the schoolhouse, and hid the cache in their room in the alcaldia. Finally, before retiring, they visited the whorehouse, where they found no dangerous books and, one presumes, attempted to reclaim a few lost souls.

The village awoke at dawn to the sound of inspirational preaching and the smell of fire. The villagers emerged with tintos in their hands and their brains still bleary from oneiric escapades, to find that the two priests were burning a pile of books at the same time as exhorting the town to repentance, and to renunciation of their common faith. This was insult enough on its own, but then people began to recognise their own cherished books charring in the pile, and Doña Sisimota arrived at full pelt from the shrine, announcing that the statues had been smashed to pieces.

The exhortations of the priests were interrupted by a wave of anger that expressed itself as a shower of fruit and stones. The fathers were seized, roped about the ankles, hauled over a branch, and beaten mercilessly with sticks and with the flats of machetes until the mayor
arrived to attempt to calm the situation. When he was apprised of what had transpired, he lowered the priests down from the tree and locked them once more in the schoolhouse whilst he consulted with the elder citizens as to the best course of action.

They decided on a traditional Quechua punishment, and made Fathers Lorenzo and Valentino carry rocks for the period of a week. With these rocks they built a small minaret at each corner of their church, and thus completed a project that had been mooted for several years. The fathers were then released, their faces smeared with mule manure and their cassocks full of fire ants, and they wended their sorry way back to the capital in order to report their outrageous treatment to Monsignor Rechin Anquilar, who decided on the spot to recruit squads of faithful laity in order to protect his missionaries.

On the anniversary of the appearance of the Virgin and her two companions to Ricardo the Goatherd, the statues at the shrine in the waterfall reportedly reconstituted themselves spontaneously, and most were of the opinion that now they were more supernally lifelike and serene even than before.

‘
HE REMINDS ME
of Don Quijote,’ said Profesor Luis, and Dionisio Vivio said, ‘He reminds me of King Pellinore.’ Those two have a kind of intellectual rivalry when it comes to drawing comparisons.

I remember that this was on a day when Aurelio was telling stories to Parlanchina. I hasten to say that I have never seen her, but Dionisio drew a picture of her and showed it to me; she is tall and very slim, with hair so long that it falls about her waist. She is quite exceedingly beautiful, and by all accounts is so delightful that she winds her father around her little finger, forcing him to tell one story after another. When this happens in the plaza everybody gathers around to listen, perfectly fascinated by Aurelio’s ability to amuse the dead. Sometimes Federico is there as well, since he is married to Parlanchina in the other world, and I am told that she has a little child by him whom she suckles whilst she listens. Her ocelot, also invisible to me, torments the jaguars of the city by mischievously ambushing them, and it is a common sight to see one of our great animals rolling in the dirt to dislodge the little tigercat from its back, where it apparently clings tenaciously with its sharp little claws. When Federico arrives it gives great pleasure to his father, Sergio, the man who hires out his twin brother’s skull for the purposes of sorcery.

It is to record such strange events that I keep this occasional journal, having resolved to keep a log of all things untoward that transpire in this city. Whilst I was still in the Army I was possessed by the desire to taxonomise all the hummingbirds and butterflies of the nation, but since I deserted and came here I find myself more fascinated by the marvellous reality of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, where I can forget all about being the famous General Carlo Maria Fuerte, and submerge myself in the life of this people whose beliefs and activities are more exotic than a morpho butterfly or an oropendola.

There are two facets to this people which mark them off from
others; one is their capacity for love and the other is their mania for construction. But having said that, I realise that I might just as well have put ‘their capacity for merriment and their thirst for knowledge’. It is just that their love affairs and their edifices and contraptions are perhaps the most obvious. It is certainly the truth that the pursuit of an amour is of infinitely greater importance to them than anything else, but to an outsider I daresay that the most immediately striking thing would be the labour of their hands. It is only when one has lived here a while that one notices that this latter is only something indulged in when having a break from the former.

The first sight that a traveller beholds when standing on the cliffs above the town is a map of the world. This came about in the first place when Profesor Luis did a survey and discovered that only ten per cent of the people knew where their country was. He was so alarmed by this that he decided to issue a Mercator projection to everybody upon a piece of paper, but came up immediately against the problem that paper is an extreme scarcity in these parts, and moreover the children grew rapidly weary of copying it out over and over. He went to Dionisio Vivo, and they resolved to construct a map of the world so large that lessons in geography could be conducted either in a boat or from the heights above.

There was at the western end of the valley an area of icy swampland butting onto the curve of the river, and it is in that place that the
mappa mundi
is now situated. Profesor Luis, old man Gomez, Dionisio Vivo, Misael, Fulgencia Astiz and numerous others who helped upon a casual basis, such as some of the Spanish soldiers that Aurelio brought back from the dead, first drained the swamp by cutting a channel that joined the river further down. This accomplished, they set to work digging out the oceans and piling up the spoil to form the continents. They then modelled the landscape to include ranges of mountains, and planted the whole lot with appropriately coloured flowers, green for fertile areas and yellow for deserts. All this was on a massive scale, taking many months, and at the end of it all they dammed up the chanel and allowed the ‘oceans’ to fill with water. But this was not all. Not only did Profesor Luis pole the curious around upon a raft, lecturing eruditely upon the various countries, but Aurelio somehow caused a shower of edible fish that populated the waters, and a flock of ducks took up permanent residence,
providing us with delicately flavoured eggs. It is most impressive to climb up above and look down upon this cartographical masterpiece, and at night it is very calming to lie in one’s hammock listening to the soothing conversation of the frogs.

Whilst upon this subject I should not fail to record the extraordinary achievement in rebuilding all the terraces up the mountainsides that had once supplied the city in Inca times. They did this by very cannily cutting up into bricks the alluvial soil that had buried the city during the time of its inundation, thus serving two purposes at once. Nowadays these ‘andenes’ are literally draped with vegetables, and those parts that have been harvested are used for sheep and goats which graze off the stalks. The people have also constructed a vast machine in order to reach the plateau below, and they have largely repaired every one of the old stone buildings; I am prompted to speculate that the spirit of the Incas lives on in these parts and has infected the souls of the people with monumentophilia, if there be such a word.

They also have a great liking for stories, which is probably why they spend so much time in the plaza. Here they may listen to the sermons of Father Garcia, who never fails to amuse people by his ability to levitate when involved in his narratives. These sermons consist mainly of complicated stories told in a vernacular and frequently racy style, and are usually about the doings of angels and devils. They seem to be designed to explain morals and the supernatural reasons for the world being as it is. Theologically his ideas are most heterodox, if not actually crazy, but the levitation trick convinces many of their truth, as well as the interesting blue nimbus that develops about his head.

In the plaza, too, one can overtly eavesdrop upon the tales told by Aurelio to his dead daughter, Parlanchina. It seems that he waits in the plaza for her, until she lets herself be known by playing a trick upon him. She runs away with his hat, or she puts her hands over his eyes and says, ‘Guess who?’ or she steals his coca gourd from his mochila. Aurelio reproves her, and then he says, ‘OK, I will tell you a story, but only if you stop your pranks and listen.’

On the day when the three-hundred-year-old man arrived, he had already told three stories, the one about how the armadillo knitted his own shell and had to knit the last bits with looser knots in order
to get it done in time for a party because he had got the date wrong, the one about the woman Sabare who discovered the culinary uses of salt, and the one about the woman who married a jaguar and supplied her village with meat until she became a jaguar herself, whereupon her ungrateful family killed her and became the cause of the jaguar’s perpetual disillusionment. He was just commencing the one about the abused children who danced out of their village and went to the night sky, which is why one must never strike a child, when the stranger appeared at the end of the line of obelisks, crying at the top of his voice, ‘Has anyone seen the beast? Has anyone seen the beast?’

As he drew near we could see that he was a scrawny individual mounted upon a sorry horse. He was clad in hessian sackcloth improvised into a tunic, his feet were bare in the stirrups, and he carried a long stave which he clearly believed to be a lance. He had long, thin grey hair and a beard of the same ilk, and his skin was saddle-leather brown from his years in the sun. His eyes were like black pinpoints, which made me think that perhaps he had been smoking marijuana, and when he spoke he did so with exaggerated gestures that reminded me of the villain in a melodrama. He rode up to us, interrupting Aurelio’s tale, and glared down imperiously. ‘Is the beast here?’

‘What beast?’ asked Misael, grinning from ear to ear and nudging Josef, as if to share the judgement implicit to all that here was a lunatic.

The man appeared perplexed. ‘What beast?’ he echoed. ‘The beast that takes many shapes, but whose stomach rumbles like the sound of a pack of dogs running in the distance. Have you seen it?’

‘That would be Don Emmanuel after frijoles refritos,’ called out Felicidad, and everybody laughed.

‘And where is this Don Emmanuel?’ demanded the stranger. ‘I must kill him.’ Whereupon Don Emmanuel stepped forward, thrusting out his great paunch and his red beard, his eyes twinkling with humour. With a motion so fast that it seemed that we had not seen it, the stranger struck the unfortunate Don Emmanuel upon the side of his head with the stave, and the latter fell to the ground as though felled by lightning. Felicidad threw herself upon the assailant, dragging him from his horse, pulling out tufts of hair and and biting
him so severely in the shoulder that he bled generously from the wound.

Once the mêlée had subsided and Don Emmanuel had returned to this world, sitting upon the ground ruefully rubbing his skull, we were able to listen to the old man, who apparently had often been the victim of such misunderstandings. ‘The reason for my lamentable appearance,’ he said, ‘is that I am three hundred years old and cannot die until I have finished off the beast. I have travelled in that time many times around the world, even swimming the oceans, which always causes the death of my horse so that I have to buy another one, and I still have not found the beast.’ He shook his head in a resigned manner, and the Mexican musicologist said, ‘Surely, cabrón, it would be better not to kill this beast, and then you would live forever, no?’

The old man sighed and looked up somewhat patronisingly, as though the Mexican were incapable of understanding. ‘I am more tired than if I were infested with hookworm,’ he said, ‘and I wish for the peace of death more than a young man longs for a woman. Can you perceive how wearying it might be to travel upon horseback for two hundred and fifty years, looking for the beast? I have had thirty-three horses, and every time one of them dies I am consumed with grief. All my friends are long dead. Is there a place to eat?’

Fulgencia Astiz, that fearsome Santandereana, took him to Doña Flor’s, which is what Dolores calls her restaurant, and many others crammed themselves in there in order to satiate their curiosity. Dolores told them to eat or get out, but nobody moved, and we watched the old man eat two tortillas, three enchiladas, a chimichanga, a dish of sancocho, a dish of pumpkins stewed with chicken and sweetcorn, a whole pineapple, two guinea pigs, and the leg of a small vicuña. I need not remark that we were all entirely astonished, and he informed us that his digestive system, being three hundred years old, was most inefficient, and that therefore he was obliged to eat enormous quantities in order to be able to extract even a minimum of nutrition. He paid Dolores with coins from an old leather bag, these coins clearly bearing the head of King Pedro the First of Brazil. Dionisio took these up to the capital eventually, and came back with several thousand pesos for Dolores.