The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (25 page)

‘This is a wonderful present, my little pussycat, thank you very much. I am going to find out all about Odin so that I can assume his form effectively.’

‘O, this isn’t your present,’ she said, and shyly she reached into the bag and produced a cylindrical object wrapped in cheerfully coloured paper. He reached out and took it, trying to guess at what it was. Madame Veracruz pulled a sour face at one of his suggestions. ‘We don’t need one of those now that we have your new thingammy,’ she said.

His Excellency unwrapped it and found that it was a portion of branch. He looked perplexed and said, ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a bit of branch.’

‘Yes, but what is it for, this piece of branch?’

‘It’s a pet, silly.’

‘A pet? What kind of pet is a branch? Shouldn’t we have a parrot to sit on it, or something, and then we would have a pet?’

‘It’s the latest fashion,’ she said. ‘All over the United States people have bits of branch as a pet. You put it somewhere and you talk to it, or you can stroke it and it puts you in touch with your natural self. Even the President has one, and everybody is throwing away their pet rocks and their cabbage-patch children and their couch-potatoes.’

‘Perhaps everybody is throwing away their dogs as well,’ said His Excellency. ‘Ay, these gringos, I will never understand them. I still think my idea was better.’

Madame Veracruz smiled coyly and looked at him with her most calculatedly fetching sideways glance. ‘You will have to peel the bark off first.’ Then she turned around and popped her head out of the door to check that no one was coming, came back in and said, ‘Now
let’s play with our new toy. I want to see it work.’ She parted his gown and began a countdown as he squeezed the bulb.

She was impressed. ‘Daddykins,’ she said, ‘it’s made it go longer and thicker. I just can’t wait. Now make it go down.’

She watched it sink its head and resume its gentle repose. ‘Not bad for a man of nearly eighty years, is it?’ said His Excellency proudly.

‘I want to try it,’ she exclaimed, and she shot her hand forward and squeezed.

‘Ay, ay, ay, Madre de Dios, qué puta de hijo de perra!’ shouted His Excellency, grabbing her by the wrist and wrenching her hand away. ‘For the love of God, that was my testicle.’

Madame Veracruz was abashed and guilt-stricken, and, attracted by the outcry, the nurse walked in just as she was bending down to kiss it better. It would be hard to describe accurately the nurse’s impression of what it is like to see two Norse gods apparently engaged in a most egregious act of fellatio in a private hospital room; suffice it to say that she left precipitately, and shortly afterwards the faces of other nurses began to appear at the window at disconcertingly frequent intervals, hoping to witness either a repeat performance or something equally interesting.

It is sad to report that two days later His Excellency had to summon the surgeon and inform him that the apparatus was no longer functioning. This grave news was greeted by a resigned shake of the head and a scholarly smile. ‘I am afraid that one of the valves has stopped working,’ said the doctor. ‘It happens occasionally. We will have to open you up and install another.’

Madame Veracruz made him go through with it, and it only cost the taxpayer a few more thousand dollars. Meanwhile, in Medio-Magdalena, the death toll reached six thousand, the situation became exacerbated because the coca lords recruited British and Israeli mercenaries, and more bodies bumped their way along the bed of the river Magdalena with their stomachs filled with stones.

Felipe Galtan, father of one of the three assassinated presidential hopefuls who had campaigned upon an anti-coca ticket, was quoted in
La Prensa
as saying that, ‘Never in any country have so many tragedies happened at the same time.’

IT WAS THE
Cardinal’s name-day, and Concepcion took Cristobal’s hand and led him out into the thoroughfare in order to search for a gift. Name-days were always a problem to her because she had no salary to speak of, living off what was provided in terms of food and accommodation by the facilities of the palace. Normally she could go to the Cardinal to ask for money when she or Cristobal needed any particular item, but naturally she could not go to him in order to ask for money with which to buy him a present. She took a ring that was all that she had left of her mother, and sold it for a pittance to a ‘Syrian’ who persuaded her that it was not real gold; he gave her enough to buy more medicines from the brujo in the slums, and a present for the Cardinal.

‘It is getting worse,’ she told the medicine-man. ‘His belly swells like a woman with child, and his mind is unclear so that one of these days I am afraid that he will not recognise himself in a mirror. What can be done?’

The brujo cast cowrie shells upon the mat at his feet, and squatted over them, furrowing his brow in the effort of interpretation. ‘Does he still see demons?’

Concepcion nodded fearfully. ‘It is very bad these days.’

The brujo took a deep draw of his cigar and blew the smoke over the shells to help them speak. ‘He has a bad conscience.’

‘He has always had a bad conscience, Master.’

‘You should be careful of the child, Señora. Apart from his relentless picking of his nose, which will sooner or later cause bleeding and lead to an infestation of worms from beneath his fingernails, I think that there are going to be problems for him. Look, I threw the shells to ask about your man, and I got the configuration that means “Child”.’

‘It means nothing to me, Master.’ Concepcion looked around the tin shack with its festoons of dried herbs and shrivelled llama foetuses. She shivered at the ekekko, the household god that guarded the doorway, and tried to avoid wondering whether or not its wild hair
came from a corpse. It features were picked out in lines of cowrie shells, and its expression of amused and detached knowledgeability caused her to feel uneasy.

‘I will put vilco in the medicine,’ said the brujo, ‘and it will make him much worse. He will see the demons more clearly and he will be more terrified than ever, so you must be prepared for that, and understand that I am causing a crisis that will get it all over with much quicker. Are you prepared for that?’

Concepcion’s heart sank, and her face fell, but she said, ‘Yes, Master,’ in a low whisper that betrayed her trepidation. ‘And what if he gets worse but is not cured afterwards?’

The brujo shook his head and stroked the grey strands of his beard. ‘I will have to come to him and fight with the demons, and I might have to fight with him too, to shake his soul back into his body.’

‘You cannot,’ said Concepcion, ‘he is a priest.’

The brujo laughed so that the lack of his front teeth caught Cristobal’s attention and momentarily distracted him from swivelling his finger in his ear. ‘I can come all the same,’ replied the brujo.

‘Thank you,’ said Concepcion. ‘Look, I have brought you some oranges and a chicken.’

‘I cannot accept payment; my power would wash away in the rain.’

‘It is not payment, it is a gift.’

‘Then thank you, and Chango guard you with his thunder and Oshun preserve your beauty. Here is the medicine.’

Concepcion left the hut and went out into the mud of the favela. Across the floor of the valley could be seen the fair buildings of the capital, with the government blocks and the Hilton Hotel rising up above the colonial houses, most of whose façades had been replaced with plate-glass shopfronts. She could see the Cardinal’s palace to one side, and noticed that the perpetual drizzle was drifting in that direction. She thought of His Eminence tutting irritably and moving his chair from the lawns and into the cloister.

On the mountainsides she saw the ‘villas miserias’, sometimes referred to euphemistically as ‘new towns’, that ringed the city and made visitors reflect that the wealth of the centre was somehow obscene by comparison. She stood for a minute and observed the section of it in which she found herself. A twelve-year old prostitute whose frequent coughs produced clots of blood that congealed around
her doorway was waiting for customers who were too poor to pay her in anything other than plastic gewgaws and insults. A naked child was being washed in the rain by someone who might have been her sister but was probably an infant mother. A hydrophobic dog was being stoned from a safe distance by a small knot of drunks. It was reeling in circles, and any minute now it would fall over and consent to die. The cadaver of a cat lay in a mud-puddle, and a buzzard was circumambulating, working up a hunger. Higher up the slope a woman was wailing, probably because of a death or because of parturition. With his back against a shack, a man was defecating painfully with his trousers around his ankles. Cristobal watched with utter fascination. ‘That man is doing a poo,’ he announced, pointing.

‘Everyone poos,’ replied Concepcion.

‘Does the Cardinal?’

‘Even the Cardinal.’

‘I bet he doesn’t.’

She sighed and took his hand, beginning the long walk down to the glossy shops where she could find a present for her lover, where she would inevitably be tempted to splash out on make-up, on shiny sentimental ornaments of animals, on necklaces depicting the miracles of saints. Inevitably, she would finger these things, feel their solidity and weight in her hands, and put them back on the shelves because a shop assistant would be eyeing her suspiciously. Then a white person would come in, and the same assistant would rush up unctuously and ask, ‘May I help you at all?’

In the Calle Bolivar she came across a stall that was selling records. Bored with her search for the unformulated present, she stopped and idly flicked through the cardboard squares. She found ones from the United States, depicting men with long hair like devils, their faces painted into masks like those of Indians; she saw that they were all scowling or angry. There were ones with blonde semi-naked women on them in seductive poses, whose hair was piled up exorbitantly on their heads and whose armpits were as hairless as a little girl’s. There were pictures of groups of Negroes in sunglasses, their hair cut straight across the top so that the crowns of their heads looked like platforms. She showed one of the record covers to Cristobal. ‘If you carry on picking your nose, you will end up looking like that.’

‘Are they spacemen?’ he asked. ‘I want to be a spaceman, and when
I die I want to be a hummingbird.’ He raised his arms and tried to flap them so fast that they blurred. ‘Do I look like one yet?’

‘Faster,’ said Concepcion. ‘At this rate you will only get to be a stork.’

In amongst the vallenato records Concepcion came across a record that from top to bottom and from back to front announced its own gravitas. It bore a bust of a man with downturned lips and an expression of dour disapproval. She scanned the foreign writing and found no exclamation marks; His Eminence always said that the mark of seriousness and good style in writing is the lack of them. In large black letters the cover proclaimed ‘Beethoven: 3rd Symphony (Eroica)’ and Concepcion marvelled at the incomprehensibility of it. She held it up to the stallholder and asked, ‘Is this suitable for a serious rich man of high taste?’

‘That is all it is suitable for,’ rejoined the man. ‘I have had it for ten years and no one has bought it.’

‘I will buy it,’ she said quickly. ‘How much is it?’

The stallholder saw the light of hopefulness in her eyes and the poverty of her clothes, and was overwhelmed with charity. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It was always yours and never mine. If you ever become ugly, then bring it back.’

She clutched the precious item to her chest and tried not to cry with gratitude. She would go back and reclaim her mother’s ring from the Syrian.

His Eminence removed the wrapping from the present and was touched. ‘I have not heard this since I was a young man,’ he said. ‘When I was nineteen I went with my brother, Salvador, the one who messed up at the seminary because of his taste in obscene poetry and then disappeared, and we heard this in Quito when we were in Ecuador. It was magnificent, and afterwards we came out in such high spirits that Salvador pretended to be Superman and he bounded along the street like an idiot, and I had the first theme running through my head for weeks.’

‘You like it then?’

‘I am delighted. How did you know I would like it?’

She pulled a wry face and said, ‘I am not so stupid.’

She went away to the kitchen to make pichones con petit-pois, and shortly heard the strains of Beethoven drifting through the cloisters
and corridors. She stopped extracting the entrails of the pigeon and stood perfectly still. Something made her leave her cooking and creep upstairs, where she sat on the floor outside the Cardinal’s chamber, her arms wrapped about her knees. As she listened intently she began to weep without knowing it, and when the record was finished the Cardinal came out of his room and found her in the corridor with clean streaks descending her face where the grime of work had been washed away. She looked up at him and explained, ‘Querido, it was so beautiful, it was like making love.’

DIONISIO SHUT UP
his house and went out to look for his cats. He found one of them at Josef’s, where it was cadging panela from the latter’s wife, and the other he located behind the Palace of the Lords, where it was nostalgically making the kind of scrape that it would have done in the wild. ‘Venga, gatito,’ he said, and the great animal looked up at him innocently with its huge amber eyes. ‘Come along,’ said Dionisio, ‘we are going home.’ The black jaguar hesitated dubiously, and then followed its master, cuffing the other cat playfully about the ears and biting its neck. ‘It’s time you two grew up,’ said Dionisio, and proceeded to Sergio’s house.

Capitan Papagato was there with Francesca, and everybody was admiring the nascent curves of her first pregnancy. Dionisio exchanged pleasantries upon the subject of children, and then he and Sergio went to the corral to rope the horse and saddle it. It had once belonged to Pablo Ecobandodo, universally known as ‘El Jerarca’, and was a spirited grey stallion that nowadays objected to being separated from its female companions and was therefore difficult to catch.