The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (39 page)

‘How did you fall?’ asks General Fuerte, scratching with the pen like a chicken in the dust of the street, and I say, ‘Do you want the story or what I myself believe?’ And he says, ‘Both, of course,’ but perhaps the story and what I believe are both two parts of the truth. The story is that the sun came up suddenly one day and dried the lakes, and all the lands of Tiahuanacu about the Stone In The Middle, whose real name nobody knows, turned to salt. And there were twelve tribes of us all fighting each other, and then the Incas came and defeated us because we were divided, and they turned us into Quechuas, most of us. But what I believe is that we fell on account of Tunupa.’

‘Who is Tunupa?’ asks the General, and I say, ‘I was going to tell you,’ and he says, ‘Excuse me.’ Tunupa is the one that Misael calls Chango, except that our thunder is kinder than his. Tunupa in the first place lives in volcanoes. Tunupa had five men with him, and they were all alike. They wore white robes to the ground, they were bearded like this, like a bird’s-nest, their eyes were blue and their skins were pale. ‘They were white men?’ asks General Fuerte, and I say, ‘Probably not, because white men spread hatred, and Tunupa spreads love.’ Tunupa told us not to get drunk all the time, and he
told us to have one wife. He said, ‘Do good, not bad,’ and he told us to love each other and not to battle with each other, and those who believed him, he sprinkled water on their heads. But he annoyed the King by converting his daughter, and the King, whose name I forget but it will come back to me at a time when I do not need to remember it, he killed all the followers of Tunupa and drove Tunupa away. Nobody knows where Tunupa went. Perhaps he walked out over the sea and became the spume of it, perhaps he broke a bank with his canoe and floated to the sea from Titicaca, perhaps he became one with Viracocha, quien sabe? I believe we fell because we never loved one another, and we stayed drunk and fighting. I see you have a look of surprise, and I know that you think this Tunupa was the god Jesus of the Spanish, and the Spanish thought this too, and they treated us badly because they said that we had killed some saints, so that’s that.

General Fuerte says, ‘Tell me some more stories of your people,’ and so I say, ‘Have you heard about the monkey and the rabbit?’ and he shakes his head and writes. Once there was a monkey, and he said to the rabbit, ‘Do you find that when you shit, it sticks to your fur?’ and the rabbit says, ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ and so the monkey says, ‘O good,’ and he picks up the rabbit and wipes his backside with it.

General Fuerte says, ‘Is that a story of your people?’ and I say, ‘It is now, because I just made it up,’ and you say, ‘Ha, ha, now tell me more about yourself.’

I was one of the Aymara people who lived on the other side of the cordillera from the altiplano, which is to say that my people lived in plenty where Pachamama was not dying. But then the white people sprayed us with poison from the sky, and they shot at us, and they placed bombs under our paths which became thunder and lightning when you trod upon them, and this was because they wanted our land. And that was why we went our way, and I found my way down into the jungle. But before I got there I was struck twice by lightning, and that is how I became a yatiri, which is a brujo, except that in the mountains I had no one to learn from. But I am qualified by the lightning to dress in white and do divinations with the unborn of the llamas, and stick knives in the floor when a child is born and to bury the afterbirth to give it back to Pachamama in return for the child.

But in the jungle I learned to be the second person that I became,
which is a Navante. They were a good people, and that is how I was able to compare and come to the conclusion that the Aymara are not good. The Navantes wrestle each evening, but in a friendly fashion, and no one is killed. It is very good. I had two wives, one after the other, and the first was stolen by the miners, and I never saw her again, and the second died because a white man came with a bible and he sneezed. That sneeze killed all my children and half of the people, and they all died of the sneezing fever, and so we killed the white man for the sake of the people, because sometimes one must do evil to do good. But we buried him with a cross and with his bible, out of respect, so as not to appear vengeful.

And in the jungle I learned to be qualified to be a paje, which is in Aymara a yatiri, which is a brujo. And do you wish to know how one learns magic? The General nods and he says, ‘OK Aurelio, but no more silly stories about rabbits,’ and I say, ‘No, because magic is serious stuff.’

It happened because I saved the life of the sub-chief whose name was Dianari, and consequently my own life was saved by the paje of the tribe when I was dying from being oppressed by the jungle. I will tell you what the paje taught me. Everything has a song, did you know that? All things are cured by songs, but not without the exactly correct song, because each song is a path. Every animal has a song, and to learn the song one must become the animal, which is all very obvious. So to learn songs you take ayahuasca, which is very bitter, or you take shori, which is a vine. And to learn ant songs you let yourself be bitten by ants, and the fire-ant is the worst, with your neck and tongue against a tree, and you eat no food for four days except howler monkeys and songbirds. And you summon the spirits with a trumpet which is an armadillo tail, and you know if it is a bad spirit because it stinks worse than a corpse. And the paje, he dressed me in macaw feathers and necklaces made of snails, and he blew smoke into my mouth, and I learned that to each song there is a path and a spirit which is an animal, and I was completely naked. The spirits cure sickness, did you know that? I sing into the medicine, and the spirit enters it, and sometimes it is a water-spirit child with a baby’s body and a fish’s tail, and one can play a mouthbow too, twang, twang, twang, and that summons spirits like the armadillo-tail trumpet, and there are also the songs of the bamboo flute. And I
learned to become many animals. I became a snow-egret so that I could learn to understand the white man, and I flew over his dwellings which are like sky-hills and I said, ‘I would not live like a termite.’ But my best animal is the eagle, it is my animal. I have flown to the end of the sky. Did you know that at the sky’s end it sounds like pigs? I remember when my ears cleared and I could sing, and then I was a paje, and the song said, ‘The harpy eagle is coming,’ and then I was an eagle, and I learned useful information from the other birds. Did you know that the King Vulture is fond of rainbows? And the paje said, ‘Now that you are a sorcerer, people will avoid you, because they will blame misfortune on you because of your magic.’

This was true in the end, because I could not cure the sneezing death, and that is why I left to live on my own and breed dogs. I married Carmen who is black, except that her hair was red before it turned white, and I became the third person which I am now, who lives with any people without trouble or loss of understanding, several peoples at once. And now I know how many kinds of magic there are. I have learned that there are priests who turn wine to blood and bread to flesh, in substance but not in appearance, which is a great mystery. I know that Pedro knows the magic of animals, and there is Dionisio who is a different kind of brujo all to himself because we made him that way when there was a candomble and all the saints gave him powers by dancing and singing.

So now I live down there in the jungle with Carmen and with my daughter Parlanchina who is dead and has a child so that I am grandfather to a spirit. She watches the paths in the jungle, she guards them, and she walks always with an ocelot who she loves and sleeps with, and she is married to Federico who is Sergio’s son, and Federico is also dead, and he likes to watch the paths in the mountains. I say to Parlanchina, ‘Watch out, Gwubba, a marriage cannot last when one of you is always in the mountains and the other is in the jungle,’ and she says, ‘But Papacito, you live in both places at once. Who are you to talk?’ And I laugh, because it is true. I love Parlanchina with my whole heart and when I see her I want to weep because she is so beautiful, and she is like you, she makes me tell stories the whole time, but she does not write them down, she remembers them, and even so, she makes me tell them over and over.
I told her a story yesterday, do you want to hear it? Good. Here is the story.

Once a man went fishing, and he caught a giant eagle, and he thought, ‘I will paint it blue and red,’ and so he did. He took it to the top of a volcano to throw it in as a sacrifice, but the eagle objected, and he threw the man in instead. And that is the end of the story.

General Fuerte asks me, ‘Is that an ancient story of your people?’ and I say, ‘No, it was a dream I had,’ but maybe one day it will be an ancient story. Every story has to begin somewhere. Surely you have had enough of writing? And the General shakes his hand because of the cramp and says, ‘Anyway, the pen is running out,’ and I say, ‘That is why memory is superior. It has no pen to run out.’

I USED TO
be fond of quoting Augustine in matters of heresy, and now when I peruse his work I am forcibly obliged to reflect upon how it is that those of us who are connected directly with God and are enamoured of reason and law can deduce with such clarity propositions whose practical application can lead to such lamentable consequences. How easy it was to formalise the processes of Socratic dialogue into objections, answers, and replies to objections; how easily my mind flowed with my pen, co-ordinating and collating with edifying lucidity the sciences of Aristotle, the message of the Gospels, the commentaries of Saints Ambrose and Gregory, and even the illuminating writings of the learned infidels. How often I would retire late to my bed, a thousand quotations, precepts and precedents whirling in my head, and how often I would awake early in the morning with everything in perfect order, so that I would arise with a merry heart and set my secretaries to work, scribbling furiously what had been dictated to me in my repose! So great was the joy of my work that all care slipped away from me, and my mind dwelled not a moment even on the temptations of the flesh.

And now I have been drowned by the overwhelming presence of true flesh, in all its agony and valour, and daily I hear my own learned words on the lips of others who use them in perpetration of the Devil’s work, as though all my caveats and reservations counted for nothing, as though my theoretical positions, achieved with such travail of reason, should be taken as truer than the Gospels and translated to brutality. How much better if my life had passed unremarked and unrecorded in the damp silence of the cloisters! How much better if all my work had mouldered unread in the fungal labyrinth of the University of Paris! I have heard a tale of Mohammed, that once, when called to prayer, he perceived that a cat was asleep upon his robe, whereupon he severed the end of his robe rather than perturb the cat. And yet this is the man in whose name
have been committed uncountable atrocities, and now, like me, he walks unhappy in the paths of paradise.

I have seen such things! At the edge of a lake there were Aymaras who met there in silence each year with the purpose of waiting for the white man to go. These were butchered on the grounds that it is heretical to believe in the departure of the white man when their arrival had been willed by God, because otherwise it could not have occurred!

There was a young woman who was accused of having aborted a child. She was told that abortion was murder, and that murder was a mortal sin, and therefore she deserved to die, and therefore she would die. She protested her innocence vehemently and demanded proof, whereupon she was told, ‘If you are guilty, then you deserve to die, and if you are innocent, then you will arrive in heaven all the sooner, so it will be good for you to die earlier than you would have done,’ and she was abused by the bodyguard so that when they killed her she was in very truth impregnated, and the child died within her, and therefore an abortion was performed by the same people who condemned her for that sin.

And I have seen a man, who, in proof of his innocence, offered to throw himself from a high place, and with my own eyes I saw him float down from a steeple, only to be killed at the bottom on the premise that such miracles might only be performed by Satan’s aid.

I have seen forgiveness bought at great prices by those who are rich and terrified, and I have seen lunatics throw themselves upon pyres rather than abandon their delusions. I have seen the intellectually modest informed that doubt is sinful, and summarily dispatched, and I have longed for the humanism of the ancients who declared that in philosophy all things are doubtful and open to question. And I remember writing somewhere that Jews should be spared because their faith bears witness to ours, but I have smelt the stench of glowing brands smoking upon the bodies of the innocent, and I have heard it laid down as law that writers, doctors, clerks and itinerant artists are all heretics by nature and inclination, and the doctors are killed and the heretics told that medical treatment is forbidden them.

In one place the people took refuge in sanctuary, and the church was burned down upon their heads so that even the orthodox
perished, and the Monsignor who knows my work so well smacked his lips and said, ‘Where blessings come to nothing, the stick will prevail.’ And afterwards he regaled his men with tales of the miracles of St Dominic, a man who has never been seen in paradise.

I remember in another place there was a town where all were dedicated to the faith of one Ricardo of Rinconondo, and it was a place where Father Valentino turned to the Monsignor and said with great anxiety in his voice, ‘What do we do if they all convert?’ and the latter replied, ‘Do not worry, hardly any of them will convert.’ They left it utterly destroyed, even though a negotiator had been let out on the promise of free passage, and then perfidiously slain. They went to dig up and burn the mortal remains of their saint, Ricardo, but they had been exhumed already by the faithful and carried away, sown up in the hide of an ox. And there was a Jew there, and someone proposed to spare him because he had been tortured, had converted, and had betrayed many others, but the Monsignor burst into the room, and he placed thirty pieces of silver on the table, exclaiming, ‘For what price is Christ to be sold once more to the Jews?’ and so they fabricated a charge that the Jew had cut out the heart of a Christian infant and then crucified it as a spell to destroy Christians, making him confess to it. There was also an old woman who was mad, distracted with grief because of the extinction of her family, and she came forward each day to denounce herself in the hope of death, but each day they sent her away in order to enjoy her torment. Then there came a day when she did not denounce herself, and so they arrested her and condemned her upon the evidence of her previous confession. She was thrown upon the flames like all the others, wearing a dunce’s hat upon which was inscribed the names of all the crimes she had admitted.