The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (31 page)

His Excellency turned to a letter from the College of Heraldry (Baltimore), pursuant to his desire to adopt a suitable ‘achievement’ for his own use, and found himself intellectually entombed beneath an avalanche of quaint jargon; ‘Erminois?’ he muttered, ‘A bouche . . . sable . . . mantling? Nebuly or invected? Fusilly, escartelly? Dieu et Ma Femme? Lioncels addorsed? Jaguars rampant regardant? Saracens salient?’ He snorted with impatience and wrote the college a note which said, ‘Just send me some pictures.’

His Excellency was not in a good mood. His special gringo device for ensuring automatic erections had taken much of the pleasure out of his life because, now that he could pump it up at any time in order to gratify Madame Veracruz, she made him do it even when he did not truly wish it. He would lie on his back watching her gyrations and her truly extraordinary and disconcerting facial expressions, and find his attention wandering. He made cracks in the ceiling into maps of mountains and roads. He fantasised about reuniting the countries of northern South America into Gran Colombia. He composed glowing obituaries for himself. He reminisced about his student days and his first dose of clap. He solved the National Debt by blackmailing the president of the United States and drilling all the way through the world into the Siberian oilfields. He recited in his imagination all the nationalist poetry he had learned by heart at school, and all the indecent playground rhymes afterwards. He wished he could read a book, and felt himself growing sore.

His Excellency’s spirit was flagging. The thought of leaving the capitals of Europe behind him in order to return to the perplexities and prevarications of office rendered him deeply depressed, and he
wondered whether it might not be possible to continue to rule from abroad. He read the letter from Cardinal Guzman accusing him of raising by black art the demons that tormented him, and he sighed. He read the letter from ‘Eva Perón’, saying that there were religious fanatics loose in the countryside, and he shook his head with despair at the same time as reminding himself that he must one of these days get around to giving permission for the Armed Forces to suppress them. Just now he would costume himself as Odin, and await Madame Veracruz, who would shortly be appearing as Freya, complete with her necklace of Brisingamen, her cloak of flight, and her horned helmet which was regrettably too large for her and tipped forward over her eyes at the moment of orgasm, just as had the headdress of Isis during their Egyptian period.

‘Hello, Daddykins,’ she exclaimed as she opened the door dramatically and revealed herself in all her Nordic raiment. ‘Who are you today?’ She looked him up and down and added, ‘Not Odin again?’

‘Yes, my little Pussycat, Odin again.’

Madame Veracruz had researched Freya thoroughly, discovering that that goddess was remarkably promiscuous, and so she had arranged for her husband to be sometimes her incestuous brother, Freyr, or one of the four dwarfs with whom she had slept in order to procure the necklace. ‘I thought you could be Loki today, Daddykins, and play some naughty tricks on me.’ She skipped forward daintily and kissed him coquettishly on the end of the nose. ‘Look,’ she exclaimed, opening her cloak of flight to reveal a freshly trimmed delta of Venus and a leather brassière with holes for the nipples. She performed a pirouette which swept the ashtray from the table, and fell theatrically upon the floor, holding out her arms to him. ‘Go on, pump it up. What are we visualising today?’

‘It will have to be the National Debt. Ever since we started concentrating on immortality the debt has been rising again.’

She pouted and said, ‘But the National Debt is a big bore, Daddykins. Why don’t we concentrate on our little daughter becoming a human being? And afterwards we can go to the Pompidou Centre and the Rodin Museum.’

‘It must be the National Debt, Pussycat,’ he replied, and he adjusted his eyepatch, pulled his floppy hat low over his face, and, with an extreme sense of apathy, reached into his cloak to pump himself up.

DIONISIO VIVO WAS
sitting in his bookshop, studiously composing another of his celebrated musical palindromes. His head felt very cold where his mother had sheared away his hair, and he stopped frequently to scratch the scars upon his neck, which were itching in an ominous manner. Leticia Aragon always said, ‘Whenever the scar of the rope itches, I expect good news, and when the six-centimetre gash itches as well, then I expect bad news,’ and it seemed to be true that it always worked out in just that fashion.

Pedro the Hunter knocked at the door and entered with his milling pack of silent dogs, so that Dionisio’s two jaguars felt obliged to leave the room in disgust.

‘Hola, Pedro, have you come to take a copa with me? Sit down.’ Dionisio pushed a chair in his direction with one foot, and Pedro made a gesture of polite refusal. ‘Forgive me, cabrón, but these stacks of books make my mouth go dry and my palms sweat. Just imagine all the hours spent with a pen that could have been spent fishing or tracking a puma.’

‘Puma skins rot,’ observed Dionisio, ‘but a book might last forever.’

‘Not everything that endures is good,’ riposted Pedro. ‘Look, I was in Ipasueño, and someone gave me this letter to give to you.’

Dionisio took the proferred envelope and noticed that it was addressed simply to ‘Dionisio Vivo, in Cochadebajo de los Gatos’. It was covered with grimy fingerprints and bore no stamp. ‘I think it was given to you by a mechanic,’ he said.

Pedro left, and Dionisio opened the letter to find that it was from Agustin, the policeman who used to collect the dead bodies from his garden in the company of Ramon.

Dionisio read the letter twice, folded the paper in his fingers, and was filled with the sense of being an improbable survivor. He thought of Velvet Luisa’s vibrant smile, her pointed breasts, the immaculate black silk that was her skin, and tried to imagine all that life shrinking and mummifying beneath the stones of Ipasueño cemetery. He thought of how she had been betrayed by her sister, of how one is so often a victim of circumstance, and his mind returned to the impossible image of Luisa as a corpse. He decided to go to see Profesor Luis.

Farides was in the kitchen as usual, and as usual Profesor Luis was standing in its doorway feeling guilty about her unshared labours. She smiled brightly at Dionisio as he came in, and Luis grinned sheepishly and raised a hand in greeting. Dionisio handed him the letter and asked, ‘What do you make of this?’

Profesor Luis read the letter and reflected a moment. ‘I think that it tells us to make the most of each other whilst we are here, because life is cheap and death arrives too soon.’

Dionisio nodded. ‘Exactly. All my friends keep dying. And because of that, I am going now to find Leticia, to see what colour her eyes are today, and I am going to memorise it.’

As Dionisio departed, Profesor Luis turned to Farides and said, ‘You had better take advantage of my offers of assistance, because when I am gone there will be no one even to stand in the doorway.’

Farides grimaced and handed him a guinea pig. ‘Go outside and skin that, then.’

He took the limp rodent and commented, ‘There must be some more pleasant task with which to evidence your love.’

‘There is,’ she replied. ‘When you have done that you can empty the bucket in the excusado for once.’

TERTULIANO TOMÁS KAISER
Wilhelm Tebas de Tapabalazo, a man who had travelled life apparently unburdened by the idiosyncrasy of his name, had spent his years as the foremost surgeon to the wealthy and the influential leading a double life. There was nothing he did not know about the afflictions of the affluent; he knew about the bloat and tenacious constipation of those who eat nothing but expensive cuts of meat and frivolous soufflés. He was fully equipped to deal with the imaginary gynaecological problems of aristocratic women who marry for money and influence, but who baulk at the fulfilment of marital rites. He could detect at one hundred metres the indiscreet and democratic onset of the clap, and would sensitively diagnose it as ‘an unspecific melisma’, in the satisfying knowledge that none of his patients would have heard of such a technical term for a melodic embellishment crammed with grace notes. He had mastered the art of palpating flesh that was interred deep beneath stupendous folds of fat, and he could visualise keenly the presence of portentous stalagmites of cholesterol in the arteries of unexercised hearts. He believed in the efficacy of pantagruelian quantities of garlic for purifying the blood, and in lofty and paternal intimidation as a specific against mental disorder and hypochondria. His solemn air, his mellifluous and tuba-like voice, his enormous face and cold hands, and the half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, inspired fanatical confidence and devotion amongst his coterie of plutocratic patients, who always declared that Doctor Tapabalazo was expensive, but worth every centavo.

What they did not know was that Dr Tapabalazo was an improvident recycler of wealth. He lived in moderate style in the suburbs, amid a chaos of unreadable books. He loved old German volumes in gothic script, books from the East that were written in whirls and flourishes and were supposed to be perused backwards, books from China that were painted rather than written, books in Old Norse and Luxembourgish, and he collected them with an assiduity and
dedication that were a testament to his lifelong belief and asseveration that everywhere in the world there were meanings and connotations that were utterly mysterious. He could spend happy hours flicking through his collection, adrift in a sea of speculation and wonder because of the simple miraculous fact that most of the world did not speak Castilian. Nothing impressed him more than to see a foreign film on television, in which dogs obeyed commands in German or French. He would shake his head in surprise that even animals could intelligently comprehend foreign tongues of which he personally understood not a single syllable.

But the greater part of his very considerable earnings were spent on establishing and maintaining a string of clinics that stretched from the favelas of the capital to the remotest Indian villages of the sierra. His desk was covered with jotted notes that computed how many cases of leprosy could be arrested with the income from one case of overactive imagination treated with placebos and bottles of sugar syrup, how many cases of scabies or impetigo could be treated with the revenue from three prolapsed oligarchic wombs or four anti-distemper injections for the huge black jaguar that lived off Turkish delight, and which the President’s wife disconcertingly referred to as ‘my little daughter’. He calculated that the proceeds from operating on the Cardinal’s growth would bring in enough funds to supply a thousand impoverished young mothers with contraception for an entire year.

When Cardinal Guzman was delivered to the hospital, vomiting and raving, his stomach cruelly distended, Dr Tapabalazo diagnosed cancer and paranoid delusions. The latter he proposed to treat later, with a course of severe criticism and acerbic remarks, and the former he would treat at once, but with little hope that his patient was not already riddled with secondary growths. He felt a glow of
schadenfreude
at having the Cardinal at his mercy, because he had been educated in a convent, and consequently was now a leading figure in the National Secular Society.

With his brow knitted and his spectacles in peril of sliding off the end of his nose, he placed his cooling hands on the Cardinal’s belly, and closed his mind to all but the impressions that he received from his practised fingertips. The stomach was tighter than a snaredrum, and he had the intuition that much of what lay therein was liquid.
But a determined poke above the navel revealed that there was something solid and amorphous in there also. He inspected the thin face, the bony legs, the unpadded ribs, and knew without asking that for some time Cardinal Guzman had been unable to keep down his food. The afflicted man opened his eyes and jerked his body. ‘I murdered Cristobal,’ he said.

‘Be quiet,’ said the doctor sternly. ‘You have all but managed to murder yourself. You should have had this treated months ago, when it first started. Did you think that God was going to make it better on His own?’

The Cardinal’s eyes flickered and closed. ‘It was my punishment.’ A trickle of saliva meandered out of the corner of his mouth and found its way down to the pillow.

‘I am going to do a laparotomy so that I can do a laparoscopy,’ announced Dr Tapabalazo, relishing the inscrutability of his terminology, ‘which means that I am going to cut you open and have a look. When I have sewn you up again and had a good think about it, I am going to cut you open again and put everything right. I would like to warn you that any of my patients who die are charged double, since the process of probate ensures that their capital becomes liquid.’

‘You should let me die,’ murmured the Cardinal.

‘Between you and me, I feel very much inclined to,’ jested the doctor, ‘but it would be most unprofessional. Now, I am going to allow you very few visitors, so perhaps you will be so good as to tell me which ones you particularly want to see.’