The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (26 page)

Today was no exception. Sergio tempted it with a grenadillo while Dionisio crept up with the bridle, but at the last second it pricked up its ears, snorted, and triumphantly departed to the far end of the corral with the grenadillo safely installed between its molars. ‘Mierda,’ they both exclaimed, and Sergio said, ‘Why do you not command him?’

Dionisio was famous for being able to communicate directly with animals, but he shook his head and replied, ‘It is all very well commanding him, but he will not obey. This is a truly Latino horse, amigo, and therefore he will work only when there is no choice. Believe me, he and I are old friends, and he knows that he is in for a long ride. Come here, caballo, or I will give all your fodder to a mule.’

The horse laid back its ears and showed its teeth in that typical
equine expression that looks like a demented smile, and trotted briskly back and forth along the end of the corral. He bit one of the mares on the backside and stood still with satisfaction as the mare kicked out at him. ‘We will have to lasso him,’ said Sergio.

Nowadays most lassos are made of blue nylon rope, and the consequence of this progress is that horses are much harder to catch. The rope picks up permanent and intractable kinks that make it almost impossible to make a perfect loop with it, and furthermore it severely burns the hands if the horse should decide to run. But Sergio still used the old-fashioned kind that was made of twisted cowhide and formed generous circular loops, and with this he casually walked to within a few metres of the recalcitrant horse. The latter saw the lasso and shied back, so Sergio deliberately walked past him and made as if to launch the lariat at another horse. At the last minute he spun around and landed it neatly over the neck of the astonished stallion. ‘He is not very bright, is he?’ remarked Dionisio. ‘He falls for that one every time.’

‘Some people say that horses have no memory,’ observed Sergio, ‘but my opinion is that he likes to be caught. It is simply a matter of honour to appear to resist, and in this way a horse is very like a woman, eh cabrón? Except that no woman resists you, it seems.’ Sergio clicked his teeth and smiled salaciously.

Once caught, the animal stood stock still as Dionisio placed the leather garra upon its back, heaved up the saddle, and then tightened the cinturon about its chest. As he put on the bridle the horse very deliberately stood on Dionisio’s foot and shifted his weight. ‘Ay, ay, ay,’ exclaimed Dionisio, pushing against the animal’s shoulders to make it move. ‘Hijo de puta.’

Sergio laughed with his arms crossed, leaning back against the rails of the corral. ‘It is not the horse who has no memory. He catches you every time like that.’

‘He is one hell of a humorist, this horse,’ said Dionisio ruefully, inspecting his already swelling toes. ‘When I first had him he had no spirit at all, and now he is a trickster.’ He mounted the stallion and shook the long hair away from his face. Sergio smiled up at him, thinking that he looked the very image of an Indian in an old Western, with the police pistol stuck into his belt, and the long-tailed shirt that served as his raiment. But in comparison to Dionisio the horse was
very richly adorned, because it still wore the accoutrements owned by its previous master, the coca cacique, Pablo Ecobandodo, who had caparisoned it in leather studded with silver and emeralds. On a sunny day Dionisio could be seen coming from a great distance on account of the glittering flashes from his saddle, and this was another of the reasons that he was regarded with a kind of superstitious awe even by those who knew him well.

The jaguars followed behind the horse, swiping at its tail and dodging kicks, and Dionisio rode to the habitations of each of his women, calling upon Leticia Aragon the last. She was washing the first of Dionisio’s children to live, and she smiled and turned her face upward so that he could bend down from the saddle and plant a kiss on her cheek. She held up the child for him to kiss, and he patted her cheek and cradled her for a moment in his arms. This child was Anica Primera, because he had thirty-two children, all of which were designated by their order of arrival. The boys were all called Dionisito and bore upon their necks the hereditary scar of the knife and the rope, and the eighteen girls were all called Anica, according to his wish. What all of these children had in common were the strikingly blue eyes of Dionisio, also to be found upon his ancestor, the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, and upon his father, General Hernando Montes Sosa.

It would have been quicker for him to walk, because he had acquired the Indian art of covering enormous distances over impossible terrain in very short periods of time. Aurelio and Pedro also shared this skill, and it was a terrible frustration for anyone to travel with them, finding themselves left behind by people who were apparently sauntering. Aurelio, of course, was capable of being in two places at once and knew the secret of flying off in the form of an eagle, leaving his body behind, empty-eyed and listless, and Dionisio too could give this impression by the speed of his ability to travel; but for some reason he felt today like taking the horse, and taking his time. Sometimes it is good to be ordinary.

It took him three days of riding to reach Santa Maria Virgen. In the evenings he would build a fire and wait for the jaguars to bring him a vizcacha or a cui to roast over the flames, and then he would throw stones down the mountainside for the pleasure of watching the cats chase after them in a feline caricature of football. When it became
cold he would retire to his bivouac amongst the rocks and take up his guitar. First of all he would play his ‘Requiem Angelico’ in memory of Ramón and Anica, and sometimes the curious acoustics of the mountains would carry this eerie tune to distant hamlets where the conversation would stop and people would cross themselves in the belief that this was a song of God borne to them by special dispensation upon the airwaves of the celestial ether. Afterwards the sound of sobbing would float into the night as grandmothers remembered their stillborn children and spouses who had not embraced for years reached out to each other for consolation in the face of beauty.

Afterwards Dionisio would improvise more of his renowned musical palindromes which sounded the same forwards as they did backwards. He had begun to do this as a purely intellectual exercise, but had discovered that they possessed an hypnotic fascination caused by the puzzling reverberations of the suspicion of
déjà vu
in the mind of the listener. It was a feeling of the deepest and apparently groundless unease, which only disappeared when informed of the reason for it. With these Euterpean palindromes Dionisio felt that he was expressing all the anxiety of the age, and indeed he had made quite a sum of money out of them. They were enthusiastically transcribed by the Mexican musicologist who lived with Ena and Lena, and dispatched to Mexico City, from whence the musicologist’s agent distributed them throughout the world.

When it became too cold for a musician’s fingers to co-operate, Dionisio would settle into his blanket and think about the past before he drifted off to sleep. His dreams would continue the theme of his thoughts, and he would be back in Ipasueño drinking wine with Ramón and making love with Anica. Somehow he would be both in the past and in the present, and Anica would tease him about having so many women these days, and he would say, ‘Bugsita, it takes that many to replace you,’ whereupon she would laugh and say, ‘But I am still here,’ and he would find himself confused and unable to answer. Once she came to him in a nightmare as she had been left when she was murdered, and he awoke choked with horror at her lidless eyes, her lipless mouth, the bleeding apertures where her nose and ears had been hacked away. Sorrowfully she had held out to him his first child who had died with her in her womb. He lived all over again the
insanity and anger that had found only a small release when he had killed Pablo Ecobandodo in the plaza of the Barrio Jerarca.

In the morning he would awake encumbered by the luxurious jaguars with their desire for warmth and their sweet smell of hay and strawberries, and he would have to wrestle with them to shift them off. He would break some bread for breakfast and contemplate the mist rolling along the valleys. Sometimes he would climb towards a cloud so that the level sun could shine behind him, cast his shadow upon the vapour, and create an aureonimbus that decked him out as a saint. It would be a black shadow with an aura of rainbow lights that mimicked his every move and gave him intimations of a life to come, when he would live in Anica’s world.

Generally he rode beneath the snowline for fear of chasms and out of respect for his horse. He would keep an eye out for avalanches and the onset of soroche, and sometimes he would squint against the sun in the hope of spotting condor vultures riding the updraughts of the thermals in their ceaseless quest for unmajestic carrion and ailing sheep. When he spotted an eagle he would wave in the suspicion that it might be Aurelio, and, when he was lower down where the marana begins, he would do the same when he saw a hawkhead parrot, in case it was the spirit of Lazaro.

When he finally rode into Santa Maria Virgin it was midday, and he and the jaguars were covered in the fine white dust of travel. ‘Hola,’ he called to the old man and the old woman, and gestured with his hand in that lazy wave of peasants who wish to imply that all is right with the world and nothing is worth worrying about. They waved back, grinning through the gaps left by the absence of teeth, and he passed on to the house of the young girls who tended his car.

He tethered the stallion to the doorpost, left it to chew contentedly at the straw thatch where it hung down from the roof, and ducked through the doorway. Momentarily sightless owing to the dark, he called, ‘Ines? Agapita?’ and a voice from the kitchen replied, ‘Is that you?’

‘Of course it is me. Who else would it be?’

‘That depends upon who me is. If it is not you, it might be someone else.’

‘It is Dionisio,’ he replied, ‘I am on my way to see my parents,’
and Agapita came in wiping her hands, with a shy smile upon her face. ‘I knew it was you all the time,’ she said. ‘I was just wasting time whilst I finished rolling a tortilla.’

‘You are growing so pretty that it breaks my heart,’ said Dionisio. ‘And how is Ines?’

She laughed at the compliment, and then a cloud passed across her face at the mention of her sister. ‘She has been stupid,’ she said. ‘Come out and see.’

At the back of the house Ines was arranging macaw feathers around the windscreen of Dionisio’s car. She glanced up as the two came out of the back of the house, gasped with shame, and ran off up the hillside with her arm across her face. Almost immediately she stumbled over a rock and fell sprawling. Striding forward, Dionisio went to where she lay and pulled her up by the armpits, only to find that she still held her arm across her face and would not look at him. He held her wrist and forced her arm away from her face. ‘Look at me,’ he said.

Very slowly she turned, and the first thing that he noticed was that her lips were quivering and her eyes were full of tears. The next thing he saw was that a diagonal chalky blotch had spread itself unevenly from her forehead to her neck, and his first thought was that she had been parasitised by some disfiguring fungus. Then he realised what it was and was shaken with anger.

‘This is skin-whitener. For the love of God, Ines, how could you be so stupid?’ He was so furious that for a second his hand was raised to strike her, but then he beheld her misery and his hand fell to his side. He turned to Agapita. ‘Everyone knows that this stuff is a catastrophe. For God’s sake, why has she done it?’

‘It was for you,’ said Ines. ‘When she begins her bleeding and becomes a woman she wants to be one of your women, and she thinks that you will like her more if she is white.’

He was dismayed and astonished. He looked down at the girl where she lay sobbing. She had the beautiful dark skin of one who is an Indian with a little Negro mixed in for good effect, skin of the colour that many white women lie in the sun for weeks in order to achieve. His anger was unabated; he laid his own forearm alongside her own and demanded, ‘What colour is this? Is it not darker than yours? Do you wish to insult me?’

Agapita put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Be kind to her, she knew no better,’ and Dionisio said, ‘Does she still have that stuff? Will you bring it to me?’

Agapita went back into the choza and came out with the bottle. He took it from her and inspected the label. He memorized the name of the company that made it, and then hurled it away up the mountainside. The bottle smashed with a dull pop, and he bent down and lifted Ines to her feet. He rubbed his hand across her cheek and shook his head, ‘You are very stupid,’ he said, ‘you were always going to be one of my women, I was just waiting for you.’

The young girl’s heart leapt in her breast, and she smiled through her tears. A little smirk of mischief came to her lips. ‘And Agapita?’

He turned to the older sister with surprise upon his face. ‘You too?’

The girl shrugged, raised her arms a little, let them fall to her side, and said, ‘Who else is there? All the men have gone to the towns.’

He raised his eyebrows and contemplated the fate that had conspired to make of him a responsible Don Juan. He noticed that his pet jaguars had climbed up onto the roof of the house and were sybaritically enjoying the sunshine after their days in the chill of the sierras. ‘No more skin-whitener,’ he said, and the girls shook their heads. ‘Copy them, and lie in the sun until you have returned to your colour,’ he instructed Ines, pointing to the cats.

‘You will sleep the night with me on the way back,’ announced Agapita, continuing her own train of thought.

Dionisio’s next campaign in the pages of
La Prensa
was against skin-whitener, but even after he had succeeded in getting it prohibited, people continued to bring it in as contraband. Countless exploited women continued to despoil the velvet darkness of their skin at inflated prices in the vain hope of raising their status and their desirability.