The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (40 page)

There was another place built upon a prominence and walled about, where the inhabitants wisely locked the gates to exclude the invaders. But the bodyguard emptied the cemetery and slaughtered the cattle, and improvised trebuchets with which they launched the corpses over the walls, and then went their way in the hope that the townsfolk would die of pestilence. In that episode a priest was killed by a rock hurled by a woman from the walls, but I felt no grief, for which God forgive me.

Everywhere that this crusade processed it was the policy to
excommunicate upon one pretext or another all who owned property, so that progress was infinitely slowed by oxcarts groaning with chattels, and it became impossible to travel across the countryside. Everywhere the prospect of easy wealth encouraged the vicious and the dissolute to join the campaign. No one of that company had been given the right or power of excommunication, and in this respect I judge that there was a plenary exercise in cynicism. But what appalled me the most and most oppressed my soul was the absolute sincerity and conviction of the priests.

Would to God that I had never written, and my penance has been the infinite weariness of guiding away the dead.

DOMINIC GUZMAN AND
Concepcion left the capital in their new jeep, trailed by a convoy of the press. They crossed the high plains, where the chrysanthemum houses sparkled in the sun as though innocent of the fate of the poor women who worked inside. They drove past the deserted and diseased greenhouse where Dionisio’s greatest love, Anica, and her unborn child, had been butchered by the henchmen of the worst of the coca lords, and out into the rolling mountains of the Cordillera Oriental.

The cordillera disposed of the convoy. Desperate for the best pictures, those at the back overtook on blind corners and precipitate slopes. One jeep hurled itself over a chasm, another crashed head-on into a gaily painted bus laden with hopeful rural migrants, and a third slewed sideways on the scree of a landslip, so that all the vehicles behind it piled together in an inextricable tangle of bumpers and photographic paraphernalia. Soon there would be yet more tinselly little shrines at the side of the road, marking a death with candles, flowers, a statue of the Virgin, and a monochrome photograph of the deceased.

Beyond Tunja the world lost trace of the couple, who had turned from the main road and found a place to rest in a tiny pueblo near Arcabuco. It was a village that obeyed the old custom of maintaining a shelter for travellers, open-sided, but with a roof of woven palm, and with well-bedded poles from which to sling a hammock.

They sat on the front of their jeep eating bocadillo, the sandwich of invert sugar and guava that one buys carefully wrapped in the leaf of banana or palm, and watched the sun set on the snow of the peaks. The brilliant and scintillating colours reflected each other from one mountain to the next and back from the surface of the clouds until the whole sky was illuminated, and Guzman turned to Concepcion and said, ‘Querida, it was watching the sunset that first made me feel religious.’

She licked the sugar from her fingers, and wiped them on the print of her dress. ‘It is also watching the sunset that makes one cold.’

‘I have a padded jacket for you,’ he said, and went to the jeep, returning with a quilted coat. She inspected it, felt the material with her fingers, sighed, and said, ‘I would feel like a stranger wearing that. I will go and fetch my poncho.’

Dominic Guzman felt suddenly like a failure. ‘We two have never lived in each other’s company, like a man and wife, sharing everything. I am afraid that I will be no good at it.’

He thought of all the things he had never done. He had never been to the market and shopped for her when she was ill. He had never asked her opinion, let alone conceded to it or compromised. He had never made a meal, cut wood, or swept the floor. ‘I am very ignorant,’ he said.

‘Tchaa,’ said Concepcion. ‘Everything will be learned with time.’

‘I only know about big ideas,’ continued Guzman, as though he had not heard her.

‘Anyone can have big ideas,’ said Concepcion. ‘I have some big ideas, and most of them I thought of for myself, and then I found out that others have thought the same, and then I found out that other people have big ideas that are exactly the opposite. And when I think about it even more, I decide that only small ideas can be true, and the big ideas are too big to fit inside anybody’s mind, so there is no point in trying to have them. You know what my mother used to say, when I asked her a question like, “Why does God let babies die?” She said, “Pregunta a las mariposas.” Go and ask the butterflies, because they don’t know any better than anyone else.’

Guzman laughed and scratched the scar of his operation with a gesture that had become an unconscious habit. ‘How should one live then?’ he asked.

‘We must give some more sugar-water to the hummingbird,’ said Concepcion, following with her finger the shimmering little creature that was darting about her head delicately removing the grains of bocadillo from her lips, ‘and we must give the bird a name, so that we can call it. I will put drops of honey on a list of names, and the bird will choose its own name.’

Until that point the pueblo had seemed deserted, except for two dogs, numerous chickens, and a vast sow that was fast asleep in a
scrape of her own making. But as the world was on the point of darkness and Guzman was looking in the glove-pocket of the jeep for a flashlight, a small procession of cholos entered the village. On their shoulders they bore billhooks and spades, and accompanying them were weary little mules laden with stupendous piles of quinoa and alfalfa.

The villagers looked at them incuriously as they filed past, each one raising a hand and saying, ‘Buena’ tardes.’ Guzman raised his hand in the customary gesture of blessing, but converted it diffidently into a wave of greeting.

‘They are hard people,’ came a voice from behind them that bore a distinctly Putumayo accent. ‘They drink too much, they don’t wash, they work without resting, they fight, they don’t vote, and you can never tell what they’re thinking.’

Guzman and Concepcion turned about, to behold a large black man with a shotgun, garbed in tattered clerical dress. His priestly shoes were coming apart at the uppers, and on his head he wore a straw sombrero that had frayed about the rim. ‘Don Balsal,’ he said. ‘I am the priest, and those are my little flock. May I offer you something to eat? A little coffee? A bed for the night? I have a nice little hut.’

‘We would be very grateful,’ said Guzman. ‘We had been reconciling ourselves to a night out in the fresh air.’

The priest hunched his shoulders ironically, and said, ‘I can assure you that it will be just as cold in my hut, but at least you will not be disturbed by Olga.’ In response to the couple’s puzzled expressions, the priest pointed to the sow. ‘Olga,’ he said. ‘She lives off the excrement of the villagers, since there is little else to feed her with. She seems to enjoy it, but I, for one, would consequently not enjoy her company out here. If she ever gets eaten we will all die of parasites, if we have not first died of something else. I haven’t been paid for five years.’

Guzman flushed with guilt, and held his peace. He and Concepcion followed Don Balsal into his palm hut, and found themselves confined to a prison of darkness disturbed only by the sound of the priest moving about. A match flared, and a taper was lit that quickly filled the room with the noxious fumes of burning fat. The priest
unceremoniously lifted a chicken from its nest on a shelf, and triumphantly produced an egg. ‘Supper,’ he announced.

Guzman went to the jeep and returned with a box of food, a small camping stove, and a bottle of wine. ‘You can keep all this,’ he said to the shadow that he had to assume was Don Balsal. ‘I will buy some more tomorrow.’

Don Balsal lifted the taper over the box and whistled. ‘Gold, frankincense and myrrh,’ he said. ‘I think I will keep the wine for communion, as I have always had doubts about having to use pisco and aguardiente.’

In the tenebrous light of the taper and of the stove, Concepcion showed Don Balsal how to make arepas with maize flour, eggs and dende oil. The latter was overcome with the simple delight of it, and exclaimed, ‘Señora, blessed art thou among women! This is a skill that I shall pass on to everyone.’

‘Why do you carry a shotgun?’ asked Guzman suddenly. ‘I would not have expected it of a priest.’

Don Balsal transferred his attention from the arepas and replied, ‘Because it would be irresponsible not to. The coca people send out jeeps to abduct the little daughters of the peasants, and not long ago a party of religious fanatics arrived at La Loma and wiped out the whole village. What am I supposed to do? In places like this one is not just the priest, you know. One is the schoolteacher, the doctor, the Army, the police, the vet. There used to be a priest in every village around here, and now I am the last, so that I am always walking from one place to another. I even have to chew coca leaves like everyone else, just to keep going. I have written to the Cardinal many times.’

Concepcion put her hand over that of Guzman, as though by this gesture she could reconcile him to the history of his failure, and he said, ‘I hear that the Cardinal has resigned, proclaiming himself unworthy of the position. Perhaps things will improve a little now.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Don Balsal. ‘The only thing that will improve this place in the absence of good government would be if some rich benefactor moved into the district, secured some essential services, and provided some employment.’

‘You might get some terrible caudillo who reduces you all to
servitude,’ observed Guzman. ‘I hear that philanthropic landlords are few and far between.’

‘There is no civilisation without good cooking,’ said Concepcion. ‘Eat these arepas before they go cold.’

‘For progress we must have strength, and for strength we must have good food,’ exclaimed Don Balsal, and he put a whole arepa into his mouth. He closed his eyes in ecstasy, like a Frenchman who has discovered a new and wonderful wine, and allowed the warm egg-yolk to trickle about the inside of his mouth. He chewed to release the flavour of the maize, and it seemed to him to waft about the inside of his head like smoke. ‘I am going to get drunk on this,’ he proclaimed happily.

Concepcion and Guzman slept soundly that night on the straw petate mats, using cushions from the jeep as pillows, and the padded jacket as a blanket. They awoke in the first chilly light of morning to find that they were sharing their warmth with Don Balsal’s chicken, a fleabitten cat, and a shorthaired dog with one missing eye. Concepcion breathed deeply and said, ‘The air is so clean that it hurts.’

‘I bet that the river does not stink hereabouts,’ said Guzman. ‘I bet that one can drink the water from it. I am going to go out and have a wash in it.’

He was standing shivering in the freezing water, gingerly splashing himself, when Don Balsal stood above him on the river bank and said gravely, ‘It is all right to pretend that this is the Jordan and that you are being baptised, but to wash upstream of a village is antisocial. You should go downstream where no one takes the water.’

‘Forgive my ignorance,’ said Guzman, hastily climbing out of the stream, so that his feet became instantly dirty again in the mud. He towelled himself and then looked up at Don Balsal, who was regarding his with an ironic eye. ‘Father, can I make a confession to you? Where is the church?’

Balsal gestured expansively. ‘The whole world is a church. You can make confession here.’

Guzman knelt in the mud before the priest, and began, ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned . . .’

‘With me you can leave that bit out,’ said Don Balsal, ‘let’s get straight to the point.’

‘I allowed my mother to die in an asylum, I caused the death of a
priest by giving away his concealment to the security forces, I caused the death of prostitute and the death of her murderer, I closed many schools, I sold a cloister to be used as a supermarket, I impregnated my maid, I avoided blessing the pious widows, I have often treated Concepcion very badly, I destroyed a gift that she made to me, I have negligently lost my only son, and I have performed my duties poorly.’

‘I didn’t know we had any supermarkets,’ said Don Balsal.

‘I have sinned very grievously, Father.’

‘Tell me, my son, are all these allegations against yourself true, or is this the assault of an irreverent sense of humour?’

‘Father, it is true. Forgive me Father.’

Don Balsal looked down at him sternly. ‘As a man, I say that you ought to be shot. As a priest, I forgive you. Go and sin no more.’

‘Do I have no penance?’

Don Balsal scratched the stubble on his chin and glanced up at the sun as it lifted above the pristine snow of the sierra. ‘Just do something useful with the rest of your life. If you say you have lost a child, go and find some others who need to be found. If you have taken life, then give life back. If you have sold what you should not have sold, then buy for someone else something that you do not need to buy.’

Guzman digested this verdict in silence, and then asked, ‘Father, would you marry me to Concepcion?’

But Concepcion would have none of it. ‘I am not mad,’ she announced, when the idea was proposed to her later. ‘If we were married legally by a mayor and religiously by a priest, you would only take me for granted. And as far as I am concerned, my cadenay, we have been married in fact already for many years, so that this idea is an insult. I will only consent to be married to you in the fashion of my mother’s people, who always live together first, which is only common sense.’

And so it was that they mounted a hill, and Guzman listened as Concepcion proclaimed to the wilderness, ‘I dedicate myself to the moon and this man to the sun. I will nourish him as I do myself, I will take the same care of him as I do of myself, I will give him the use of my fertility.’ She turned to him and put her arms about his neck, ‘There, my cadenay, we are married.’

‘Don’t I have to say anything?’