The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (35 page)

Profesor Luis: This is probably our biggest and best jaguar obelisk . . .

Don Emmanuel: This represents Pachacamac’s penis inserting itself into the resplendent pussy of the sky . . .

Mama Julia: I feel really marvellous.

Profesor Luis: This is the axle-pole with which we brought a giant reel of rope to the city . . .

Don Emmanuel: Here is our telephone system which operates on invisible wires . . .

Mama Julia: Oooooo, ay, ay, ay . . .

Profesor Luis: This is Doña Flor’s Restaurant, owned by Dolores . . .

Don Emmanuel: This is where Manco Capac stayed for four days when struck down by amoebic dysentery . . .

Mama Julia: I don’t feel hungry anymore, yahooha, oooooo . . . Profesor Luis: This is where the line of the mud used to come to before we dug the city out . . .

Don Emmanuel: The shit came up to here during the last plague of pigs . . .

Mama Julia (singing): There was a lovely sailor boy who came from far Peru . . .

General Hernando Montes Sosa: For God’s sake, my dear, what has got into you?

Mama Julia (singing): I said I’ll drop them down, my love, I’ll give it all to you . . .

General Hernando Montes Sosa: For God’s sake, woman.

Profesor Luis: This is Dionisio’s book exchange . . .

Don Emmanuel: This library houses a significant collection of early Byzantine pornography . . .

Mama Julia: La, la, la, I’ve forgotten the words, oo ah oo . . .

Dionisio was obliged to take his mother away and shut her in his house, still hopping from one foot to another and remembering snatches of naughty songs from her schooldays, and came back at just the moment when the British Ambassador was beginning to realise that Don Emmanuel’s translation was a joke at his expense. His ears became more and more flushed as his anger’ mounted and his diplomatic sang-froid became more strained. ‘What school did you go to?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Dartington,’ replied Don Emmanuel, whereupon the Ambassador said, ‘That explains it; I thought you were an unusual species.’

‘And where did you go to?’

‘Eton.’

‘Excellent, excellent,’ smiled Don Emmanuel, rubbing his hands together and gleefully realising that his weeks of choir practice had not been wasted. ‘How do you know when a whore is full up?’ he asked.

The Ambassador was astounded. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘She gets a runny nose,’ said Don Emmanuel.

The Ambassador winced and from that moment ignored his compatriot as far as could be managed under the circumstances, a feat that was made temporarily easier by the unanticipated non-cooperation of the titanic lift.

The General, Profesor Luis, the British Ambassador, and Hectoro (still mounted imperturbably upon his horse) had all got onto the lift and were descending towards the plateau. Profesor Luis was pointing out to the General the features of the landscape, and the General was feeling the profoundest admiration for the ingenuity of the constructors of the lift, when it ground suddenly to a halt, leaving them swaying in mid-air only half-way down the cliff. Profesor Luis instantly became agitated, for his contraption had failed when carrying by far the most important person that he had ever met. ‘I am so sorry,’ he repeated insistently, ‘I am so sorry, I cannot imagine what
could have gone wrong,’ and hopped from one foot to the other, mopping his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and rushing from one end of the platform to the other, tugging futilely upon the massive ropes.

‘Please do not be so concerned,’ said the General, ‘the lifts in the government building do this all the time,’ and the British Ambassador, not for the first time, began to wish that he had not adopted a diplomatic career. ‘Have a puro,’ said Hectoro, offering each of them a cigar from the height of his saddle, ‘it will help to pass the time.’

Up on the top of the cliff there was much consternation; no matter how much the people heaved and Cacho Mocho strained, the pulleys were locked. One or two people who suffered from the deeply ingrained national suspicion of machinery could not suppress their glee, and walked about saying, ‘I told you no good could come of it; if God had wanted us to have lifts he would have created them Himself.’

Don Salvador the False Priest turned to Father Garcia and asked, ‘Can you not levitate down there and then push it up to the top again?’ And Father Garcia responded impatiently, ‘No, I cannot. In the first place I can only do it when I am not thinking about it, in the second place I cannot push anything else up because there is no ground against which to stand, and in the third place it only happens when I am preaching and I could not concentrate on a sermon under these circumstances. You must ask Profesor Luis what to do, for the machine is his, and only he understands it.’

But Profesor Luis was half-way down the cliff and was unavailable for comment. Sergio suggested fetching Dionisio, but he could not be found because he had taken his mother on a brisk walk in order to try to work off the anomalous effects that the coca had had upon her metabolism, and so the puzzle was left to Misael to resolve, since his had been the idea of building it in the first place.

He clambered all over the pulleys and gantries, peering into the works in order to see whether or not their alignment coincided with his memory of it, and attempting to ignore the unhelpful suggestions of those down below. In the lift, Hectoro’s horse trod heavily upon the foot of the British Ambassador, and Profesor Luis found himself unable to restrain the tears of his disgrace. He leaned against the side,
his shoulders heaving, and General Hernando Montes Sosa felt obliged to pat him and make soothing noises.

Remedios decided to resume her habit of command, ordering everybody to solve the problem at once upon pain of her perpetual contempt, and at this point the Conde Xavier Pompeyo de Estremadura came forward, waving his sword dramatically and exclaiming, ‘I have it, by God, I have it. We had such a machine during the siege of Arakuy in the year of Our Lord one thousand, fifteen hundred and thirty-one. We would merely wind it back a mote and then release it, by God.’

The Conde’s idea was put into effect, and, as if by miracle, the lift jerked upwards and then resumed its long-delayed descent. The Conde leaned over the cliff, exultantly exclaimed, ‘God’s balls,’ and swaggered amongst the crowd, condescending to receive their congratulations. He ran towards Remedios, his lover, in order to enjoy the admiration that was his due, and fell headlong over a pig.

‘
ARE YOU WELL
, my cadenay?’ asked Concepcion. ‘The doctor says that the operation was very good.’

She was standing at the foot of the bed, attired in her best floral dress, clutching a straw hat that, owing to her nervousness, was in danger of becoming kneaded out of shape.

His Eminence smiled wanly and beckoned to her to come and sit by him on the bed. ‘Why do you have a black ribbon on your arm, querida? Did you think that I was going to die?’

She bit her lip, and her shoulders began to shake with suppressed grief. ‘It is Cristobal,’ she said, ‘I can’t find him, and it is all my fault.’

Deep concern passed over the Cardinal’s face. ‘What has happened?’

‘When you fell on the floor I ran to the secretary, and then the whole palace was running about calling ambulances, and everywhere was confusion, and then I came all the way here on foot so that you would not be ashamed, and I asked the doctor about you, and afterwards I went out, and I was crying so much that a kind woman in the street put me up for the night in a whorehouse, and in the morning I remembered, “Cristobal!” and I ran back to the palace to find him, and I looked everywhere, but he was gone. I went to the police to ask about any missing children, and they told me they had heard of thousands, but no one knows where they are, and I thought, “Perhaps he has run away,” but I could not think where he would go, and I asked all his friends if they had seen him, but nobody has.’

He took her hand and squeezed it comfortingly. ‘Did you know that I had a nightmare that I had killed him myself?’

‘You told me just when you were falling on your face, but I knew it was an illusion, like the time you came in and said that the Devil had challenged you to a game of chess, and the pieces kept changing positions on their own.’

‘That will not happen any more,’ said the Cardinal. ‘It was caused by poison.’

She put her hands to her mouth in shock, and exclaimed, ‘Who would do such a thing? You do not think it was my –’

‘No,’ he interrupted, ‘it was not your cooking, and I was not blaming you. The doctor says that it was caused by the monster inside me. Apparently it was dying from its own poison anyway, but it poisoned me in the process. He said it was like very extreme constipation, when the poisons that should be ejected are reabsorbed into the body, and it causes delusions and madness.’

‘What is this monster? Tell me about it so that I do not have to think of Cristobal.’

He pursed his lips and tried to think of a way of explaining it to her that she would find accessible. ‘It was like a child that has been growing inside me since I was born. Perhaps it was even a twin that grew in the wrong place in my mother’s womb. But it was a hideous freak, with everything in the wrong place, and the doctor says that it was the worst one that has ever been seen. He has given it to the university, and as soon as I am well he is going to take me to see it.’

‘A child?’ repeated Concepcion. ‘And you a man? This is a miracle. How could you have been made pregnant like this? You have never . . .’ She tailed off, too ashamed to continue. But the terrible thought could not be suppressed. She looked up and asked firmly, ‘Have you been doing it with a man?’

His Eminence laughed brightly for the first time in months. ‘Querida, I have not. It is just a miracle, a natural marvel, and it has happened in the past to other people.’

‘You should use this in your writing to prove that Mary was a virgin, against the unbelievers.’

‘I think it has to be the same sex as oneself,’ he said, ‘but otherwise that would have been a good idea.’

She smiled contentedly. ‘You have never told me before that an idea of mine was good.’ Then her face clouded over, and crumpled into tears. An awful longing welled up in her, a gap appeared in her soul, and she asked, ‘What will we do to find Cristobal?’

‘I am going to resign,’ he said. ‘I have plenty of private money. We will blaspheme when we want to, believe whatever seems reasonable
at the time, and we will try to be happy. We will go away together and search the entire world for Cristobal. Come, give me a hug.’

She leaned down, put her arms about his neck, and laid her cheek against his. ‘My cadenay,’ she said, her tears flowing down over his face.

So it was that three weeks later the Cardinal, dressed nowadays in layman’s clothes, along with Concepcion and Dr Tapabalazo, found himself amid the grisly medical collection of the university. Ouside the inexorable rain of the capital fell in its habitually noncommittal fashion, and in the courtyard outside, the students, dressed on account of an historical anomaly in military uniform, hurried to their lectures with the collars of their greatcoats turned up.

In the glass jars filled with cloudy formalin there bobbed the right arm of a famous general, yellow colons perforated like colanders, varicoloured cancers the size of tennis balls, enormous hearts taken from Indians living at high altitudes, foetuses without mouths but with genitals shamelessly attached to their foreheads, embryos with two heads, livers transformed to sponges by cirrhosis, the forlorn results of miscarriages, and the head of a man who had lived normally for years with an arrow straight through the middle of his brain.

‘This is a metaphysical laboratory,’ said the doctor. ‘I have spent hours in here looking at all these exhibits, wondering how the universe must be in order for such things to exist.’

Dominic Guzman inspected a grotesque creature in a large jar, and pondered aloud. ‘Nature’s experiments, the Devil’s miracles, or God’s indifference?’

‘Precisely, my dear Dominic. Look at the label.’

Guzman bent forward and read, ‘“The Tapabalazo Teratoma”. This is mine?’

‘It is ours now, and no amount of bribery or persuasion would induce us to give it back, I can assure you. We had to give it a haircut so that one can see some of the detail.’

‘Is this your baby?’ asked Concepcion, her eyes popping with horror and amazement. She crossed herself three times and said the last sentence of the Hail Mary.

What she beheld might at a distance have seemed to be a furry football that had gone out of shape. But a closer inspection would have revealed a sad and empty eye fixed motionlessly upon infinity.
Concepcion saw that the iris was of the same colour as that of the Cardinal. A portion of thumb stuck at a careless angle out from behind it, and a nodule projected from near by, at the end of which there dangled a tiny and useless foot. ‘It was going to be a boy,’ she said, pointing at the long pink penis that dangled from one side.

‘It had a testicle inside, at the back,’ said the doctor. ‘We dissected the poor monster and removed the inside. Then we filled it again and mounted it like this. We found every kind of normal tissue, but all in the wrong places. Did Dominic tell you? We tried to keep it alive, but there was nowhere to attach the equipment to it. It actually had some signs of adaptation, with membranes growing around individual parts to protect them, but really there was no way to prolong its existence. When I look at this awful and pathetic thing, it makes me feel very sad. I feel a kind of acute compassion.’

‘I always feel sorry for monsters,’ said Concepcion. ‘Even in fairy stories where the monster is bad and gets killed at the end, I always feel sad and I wonder if there was not another way. Did you keep any of the hair that you cut away?’

‘Certainly I did. One can tell a lot from hair.’

‘I would like some,’ she said. ‘When one loses a child, one should always have something to remember it by.’

Without questioning, Dr Tapabalazo went to a drawer and took out a folded plastic bag. ‘Have all of it,’ he said, ‘since you have a good heart.’