The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (21 page)

The stranger then mounted his horse and rode forlornly away in quest of his beast, having extracted from Aurelio the promise that he should be summoned if anybody ever saw it. I often dream of him fighting the beast, but I can never quite see exactly what the beast is. It is like a flurrying blur that screeches.

ABUELA TERESA WAS
a special person, and was the cause of the notice in the church which said, ‘No rosaries, by special request of Our Lady’. When she was no more than twelve years old she had gone to the grotto of the three statues, and was at that crucial age when the sudden burgeoning of an adolescent’s sexuality finds itself both expressed and assuaged by an access of religious fervour. She had fallen in love with Christ. He was forever before her imagination, clothed in glory but His wounds still bleeding, and she felt herself enclosed both by His enveloping feminine gentleness and His powerful masculine protection. Her face radiated serenity and contentedness such that her fresh beauty aroused no lust in men who saw her, and even at that age she possessed the extraordinary ability to love animals in a way that was entirely foreign to the community of peasants to which she belonged, a community which treated its beasts with casual cruelty at worst, and with exploitative indifference at best. In those days she had a capuchin monkey as a pet, which she used to carry on her chest, its arms about her neck in an embrace of perpetual affection, and its cheek against hers.

At the grotto she sat by the waterfall and detached the monkey so that she could say the rosary. It scampered into the branches of a flamboyant tree, and amused itself by plucking the blossoms whilst she closed her eyes, crossed herself at the crucifix, said the Apostles’ Creed, and began the Our Father of the first bead. She was saying the second Hail Mary of the third bead when a silvery voice said, ‘Teresa, please stop.’ She opened her eyes and looked about her, saw nothing, and said the Glory Be. Having reached the bead at the bottom of the loop, she commenced the ten Hail Marys of the first mystery, but had reached only the second when the same silvery voice again interrupted: ‘Teresa, should I have to ask you twice?’

Startled, she opened her eyes and looked up to behold a nimbus about the head of the statue of the Virgin, a nimbus so bright that it was impossible to gaze upon the face behind it. She shielded her eyes
and trembled, but found herself unable to rise to her feet and run. ‘I want you to know,’ said the voice, ‘that I would be very relieved to hear no more rosaries.’

Young Teresa could think of nothing intelligent or interesting to say, and so she asked, ‘Why?’ and instantly regretted her impertinence.

There came a profound sigh from behind the blaze of light, a sigh that seemed to express a weariness older than the world. ‘How would you like it, Teresa, to listen to all that? Just imagine, for one complete rosary I have to listen to six Our Fathers, an Apostles’ Creed, six Glory Bes, a lengthy litany, a concluding prayer, and fifty-three Hail Marys. Some people work their way through all fifteen mysteries, and then I have to listen to one hundred and fifty Hail Marys.’

‘One hundred and sixty-five,’ corrected Teresa.

‘Quite so,’ returned the voice, ‘and it is more than I can continue to bear. Just imagine, Teresa, at any one time there are millions of people all over the world gabbling through this in indecent haste. It is like having one’s head stuck permanently in a buzzing hive of angry bees. If you wish to say the rosary, please say only one Hail Mary for each mystery, and say it slowly and with attention.’

Teresa, never one to accept anything without question, protested, ‘But, My Lady, it says on my rosary card that at Fatima you urged the world to say it, and it says that the rosary was given to St Dominic in order to combat heresy.’

There came another sigh out of the eight corners of the universe. ‘Between you and me, St Dominic has much to answer for. Will you do as I ask?’

‘Yes, My Lady,’ said Teresa, still shielding her eyes against the ineffable and now pulsating effulgence of the light.

‘And another thing,’ continued the voice, ‘I have a message from My Son. He says that you must learn to love Him not as He is, alone, but as you find Him in your fellows.’

From that time on, no rosaries were said in the pueblito of Rinconondo, and Teresa would look for Jesus in the faces of her family, in the broken teeth of itinerant beggars, behind the eyes of the mayor, in the artificial gaiety of the village whores, and in the embraces of the man who was to live with her all her life until he died shortly before her seventieth birthday. When this occurred,
Teresa bought another capuchin monkey from one of Don Mascar’s peons, realising that such a harmless love would be sufficient to last her to the day of her own demise, bringing it to an end in a satisfyingly circular manner.

Teresa was sitting in the plaza shelling castana nuts and feeding some of the kernels to her companionable monkey when Fathers Valentino and Lorenzo reappeared in the pueblo at the head of a ruffianly band of twenty men, most of them mounted upon mules or horses, and all of them armed with rifles and machetes.

Who were these men, and the thousands like them who swelled the ranks of the crusaders? This is something worthy of explanation, because it has been a puzzle to many who have looked back over these events and wondered how it was that a nation already so troubled by internal divisions and gangsterism should have succumbed to a revival of the interminable religious conflict that had plagued it for decades and been apparently resolved by uneasy constitutional compromises. In the past the Liberals had mercilessly slaughtered, tortured and raped in the name of the modern secular state, and the Conservatives had done exactly the same in the name of Catholic theocracy, the wars continuing so long that no one had ever known when one war was finished and another had begun. They were perpetuated until at the end of them no one could remember how they had started or what the initial objectives of the sides had been, so that the final peace treaty acceded to demands made by the Liberals that had originally been those of the Conservatives, and the latter insisted upon the inclusion of clauses which had originally been fought for by the Liberals. The only way to conceive of the possibility of such an improbable outcome is to understand that there was in the national psyche an atavistic lust for excitement and combat which sought irresistibly to express itself not so much in the interest of causes, but upon the slightest and most inexcusably infantile pretexts. The nation possessed the kind of mentality that would see no contradiction in invading another country in order to impose pacifism upon it. Coupled with this, one might discern a certain compulsive acquisitiveness that is so naive that it utterly fails to appreciate its own cynicism. An idealistic war would thus manifest itself as an orgy of theft that looted both the most insignificant possessions of the poor and the bodily integrity of the women. In such times the fear and
contempt that men have for women explode into a cataclysm of rape and mutilation, and the lust for domination and extremes of experience leaves a trail of masculine dead who rot in the undergrowth, their testicles, heaving with maggots, in their mouths.

And so Fathers Lorenzo and Valentino had little difficulty in recruiting a ‘bodyguard’ that was bigger than they had expected and turned out to be too wilful for them to control, so that ultimately they had to resign themselves to its atrocities and console themselves with the thought that some evils are always perpetrated in the cause of a greater good. With the promise of plenary indulgence they found men who were prepared to leave the monotony of their wives’ control, men who would forsake badly paid and gruelling employment for the sake of an adventure, men who were happy to act tough in the name of Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild. The fathers would begin as leaders, and finish as accomplices for fear of becoming followers, which is exactly what happened to all the other priests who eventually found that their forces had congealed into a devastating plague of human locusts, at the head of whom was the dark and adamantine figure of Mgr Rechin Anquilar, who seemed to be everywhere at once, wheeling on his huge horse, the crucifix on its chain catching the light of burning huts and the red glow of the moon.

In the plaza the fathers rang their bell and called for repentance whilst their cohort of bodyguards lounged beneath the trees, replenished their water bottles from the trough, and some gathered sticks to make a fire with which they could cook some strips of meat, gaucho-fashion, upon the ends of their knives. The repetitive incantation drew the population from their houses, their eyes alight with amused curiosity and a certain wonder that the pestilential priests should have so imprudently reappeared after their previous humiliations. As before, a guava sailed through the air and flattened itself against the side of Father Lorenzo’s head. But this time a shot rang out, and the leader of the ruffians stood up menacingly. ‘Listen to the man preach,’ he said, and he spat on the ground with an air of finality. The people listened.

They heard the fathers condemn everything that they held sacred. They listened as Ricardo of Rinconondo was described as a lunatic, as Mohammed was denounced as a heretic and polygamist, as their
grotto was described as a pagan shrine of iniquity, as they were commanded to remove the minarets and reinstate the rosary upon pain of perpetual flame. At this point Abuela Teresa rose to her feet and made her way to the side of Father Lorenzo. Leaning upon her stick, summoning all the vehemence in her frail old body, her monkey clinging about her neck, she said, ‘Young man, Our Lady commanded us through me not to say the rosary. Who are you to contradict Our Lady?’

Lorenzo shook his head with a devout and pious pity that was unmistakably redolent of educated condescension. ‘It was not Our Lady, it was an apparition of the Deceiver. You have been misled, take my word for it.’

‘It was Our Lady,’ persisted Abuela Teresa, ‘she spoke to me.’

‘Have you any conception of hell?’ asked Father Valentino. ‘Is that where you wish to go? For that is what you must suffer, all of you, if you do not mend your ways. Throw yourselves upon God’s mercy.’

Abuela Teresa looked up at the two priests and began to tremble with anger. Despite her rheumy vision she perceived in them a revolting self-righteousness, an appalling collection of unexamined certainties, a terrible spiritual hubris masquerading as gentle humility, and she was utterly repelled. As if by reflex she raised her stick and set about the clerics, who raised their arms to protect their heads whilst the villagers applauded and whistled, and even the bodyguards smiled with delight.

But then the leader of the ruffians spotted his chance to earn his eternal place in paradise, and decided to give his own lesson in theology. He strode forward and wrenched the stick from the old lady’s hands, so that she fell sprawling to the dust. He bent down, removed the startled monkey from her shoulders, and, holding it under the armpits, he marched over to the fire.

The flames were by now copious and brilliant, and he turned around in front of them and raised the little creature aloft. ‘Look,’ he shouted, ‘I will show you what hell is like,’ and he suspended the monkey at arm’s length over the tongues of fire.

A horrified silence fell over the villagers at exactly the same moment as the capuchin began to writhe and shriek. There was a momentary black burst of smoke as the soft grey fur singed away, and then the clinging miasma of burning flesh filled the plaza. The capuchin
screamed like a tortured child, wriggled, attempted to pull itself higher in the man’s grasp, grinned with agony and incomprehension, and choked in the smoke of its immolation. The leader dropped it into the fire. It stood up so that it was momentarily silhouetted, and then it collapsed into the conflagration, squirmed and twitched in its death throes, and charred into lifelessness.

The people stood, too amazed and horrified to act, paralysed by the horrible drama of the little monkey’s death. But then a woman set up a long howl of anger and compassion, a man vomited upon the ground, and Abuela Teresa, consumed with a ferocious disdain and desolation, picked up her stick and went over to the fire to gaze upon the remains of her last companion as they shrivelled and shrank in their nest of flame. She raised her hands to her face, tears flowed out between her fingers, and then she knelt. She turned her head slowly towards the ashen-faced priests and said simply, ‘I will be in heaven before you.’

She stretched out her arms and threw herself face-down in the flames before anyone could stop her, momentarily experiencing for the second time in her life a light brighter than the sun.

IN THE CONSTITUTION
of the city it states that ‘It is strictly forbidden to procure abortion by hanging a woman upside down in a sackful of ants and beating her until she miscarries. But is it permitted to procure abortions by means of dried llama foetuses.’ It also states that ‘All visitors wishing to use the whorehouse must carry a certificate of clean blood from the clinic in Ipasueño’, and that ‘Anyone giving bad advice is responsible for what follows from that advice’. One might also find such items as ‘This city disapproves of the Quechua practice of weaning babies by smearing the nipples with rancid guinea-pig fat’, and poetical reflections such as ‘Gold is the sweat of the sun, and silver the tears of the moon’, and ‘When the Gods weep, their tears become jaguars’.

The constitution came into being upon the premise that anyone could suggest anything to the informal council of the leaders, and would be accepted as long as no one could think of any objections. In the case of procuring abortion by beating a woman upside down in a sackful of ants, it was Leticia Aragon who heard of the practise and proposed its abolition. She is a woman who had been the lover of Dionisio Vivo when he was enduring a fit of madness in Ipasueño; having come to Cochadebajo de los Gatos in order to bear his child, they became lovers again when he regained his sanity. She earns her living by her extraordinary ability to recover lost property, which she finds in her hammock every evening before she climbs into it.