The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (45 page)

I was not there when he poured some of the fluid over a rock and made it plastic, but the General came up the hill and informed me of it breathlessly. I thought, ‘O no, the work begins all over again,’ and I was right.

The most immense boulders were levered off the mountainside and
gathered from the plateau to be brought up in the lift. We had to construct a crane to raise the boulders up onto the wall, because we could not do it the traditional way, by making an earthen ramp, since the moat was in the way on one side, and there were houses on the other. Aurelio poured fluid over the rocks and we beat them into shape with shovels, and then he hardened them with another fluid. He was so pleased that even I, having worked my fingers to shreds and my muscles to leather, was glad to see him dancing in little circles with his hands in the air. Normally he is dignity itself.

And what do we have to show for it? A colossal defence made by request of a ghost to defend us against an implausible invasion that cannot happen in the modern world. But there were some good consequences. It blocks the wind that funnels down the valley, and one’s clothes do not disappear any more from the washing line, and sail out over the plateau; all the rocks were gathered from the mountainsides, reducing the chances of avalanche, and from the plateau and the andenes, facilitating agriculture; it is good to stand on the top and watch the sunset; there are good fish in the moat and some very edible waterfowl; it proved definitively the usefulness of the tractors; and we had a formidable fiesta, after which Antoine and Françoise congratulated me upon the euphony of my two new compositions, and the town awarded me the Supremely Elevated Order Of The Apparatus for services to architecture and musical education. I was as drunk as a German, and I trust that my speech of acceptance was as witty and apposite as I think I remember it to have been. Ena and Lena giggle every time I mention it.

JOSEF DIED BECAUSE
a pregnant woman looked at him when he had been bitten by a snake. It was not Francesca’s fault that she looked at him, because she had no way of knowing that they were bringing him up from the plateau in the great lift just as she was passing by to see whether or not she had caught any shrimps in the wicker basket. Nobody blamed Francesca, therefore, but for quite a while she felt deeply guilty.

Josef had been extremely unlucky as he swung his machete in the banana plantation. Normally a snake would have made itself scarce, but this one lay low until the machete gashed its flank, and, as if by reflex, it sank its fangs into Josefs foot and injected all its venom. Snakes are habitually parsimonious with their poison; they parcel it out carefully, innoculating their victims with just the right amount to paralyse them and begin the internal process of predigestion. Animals that they intend merely to scare away do not normally receive much poison at all, or just enough to make them more careful in the future. If snakes were humans they would be the kind of people who save up small coins and put them into investment accounts, eat chocolates only after lunch on Sundays, believe in swift corporal punishment to deter criminals, are sceptical about the value of social services, and give pocket handkerchiefs for Christmas presents. But Josef’s snake was in a state of such rage and pain that it vengefully administered a legful of lethal anaesthetic, crawled away to die an embittered death, and was gratefully consumed by ants.

Josef turned very pale, so that his open black face became grey, and he sat down on the grass to await with mounting trepidation the traditional remedy. Sergio and Pedro the Hunter tossed a coin, and Pedro lost. He wanted to toss again, but Josef said, ‘Come on, cabrón, I forgive you in advance. Let us just finish it.’

Pedro took his machete from its sheath and tested the edge for sharpness. A thin cut appeared in his thumb, and he knew that it was well-honed enough. Pedro was old, but very tall and lithe, and it
gave Josef confidence to think that such a strong hunter, dressed in animal skins, a man skilled in blood, would be doing the job with well-practised hands.

‘Close your eyes, amigo,’ said Pedro, and Josef shut them so tight that he felt that they would pop backwards into his head.

Some say that bone-pain is the worst pain that can be experienced, and others say that it is childbirth or the pain of a heart that stops suddenly. To Josef the slice of the blade seemed to crash into him like a hurtling boulder or a bullet. He threw his head back with a jerk, and a scream that never emerged from his mouth filled his skull and then exploded into the rest of his body. Whilst he was submerged beneath this avalanche, too shaken to think or to feel, Pedro raised the machete high above his head and, with absolute accuracy, completed the amputation with a second blow.

Josef felt his stomach dissolve, looked at his hands to see them shaking like leaves in the wind, fought against his nausea, and vomited. He had never previously known that one could not only experience agony, but become it. Sergio quickly bound the stump tightly in a tourniquet twisted out of the sleeve of his shirt, and Pedro urinated into the bottom of his mochila in order to place it over the wound and, according to the old wisdom, keep it from infection.

Josef fainted (‘It was from the heat, and not from the pain,’ he explained later), and Pedro hauled him over his shoulders as if he were a slain brocket. He ran towards the lift, with Sergio running in pursuit, mopping his brow with the remains of his shirt and succumbing to a kind of sympathetic post-operative shock. Near the top of the cliff Francesca leaned over to admire the view, and inadvertently caused Josef to die. The latter opened his eyes to see a pregnant woman looking at him, and knew that it was all over.

In the city there was panic. Aurelio was nowhere to be found, since both of his apparent selves were combined into one self for the purpose of bargaining with the gods over the matter of Federico’s disappearance, and Dionisio Vivo, who had the reputation of being able to deal with anything as long as it was spectacular, was in Santa Maria Virgen, making love to the two sisters who tended to the needs of his car.

Josef was brought to the whorehouse, since he wished to die in the same place as had given him the greatest happiness in life. His whole
body was visibly swelling, and a great fever was breaking out on his brow. Remedios came in and said to Pedro, ‘You will have to cure him; with Aurelio absent, you are the nearest we have to a snake-doctor.’

Pedro shook his head sadly and looked down into Remedios’ incalculably brown eyes. ‘I know only the secretos for animals. If Josef were an animal, it would be different.’

‘Try the one for a horse,’ suggested Dolores the whore in her smoky voice, ‘the man is almost a stallion.’

Pedro knelt down and muttered into Josef’s ear, but then he stood up and said, ‘No spirits left me.’

‘Try the one for a pig,’ said Fulgencia Astiz, the leader of the fanatical women who had made a cult out of bearing the children of Dionisio Vivo, ‘I hear that humans taste of pork.’

‘I spoke once to a member of the tribe that ate the first bishop of Retreta, and he said that the word of his fathers was that the bishop tasted of veal,’ offered Misael.

‘Bishops taste different, everyone knows that. It is on account of their rich diet,’ said Leticia Aragon, whose eyes were violet on this day.

‘Forget it,’ moaned Josef, ‘just call Father Garcia. I am going to die because I saw Francesca looking at me.’

Outside the door came a wail of repentance and regret, since Francesca was out there, not wishing to compound his affliction by coming in and looking at him again.

Father Garcia entered in a hurry, fully armed with Holy Water, rum to serve as communion wine, and empanadas to supply the place of Holy Wafers. With him was Don Salvador, the False Priest, who bore his new parallel text of Catullus that Dionisio had found for him in the capital on one of his trips to see the editor of
La Prensa.

‘Everybody must leave,’ announced Father Garcia, ‘I am going to hear his confession.’

‘I will confess in public,’ said Josef, ‘since I am not ashamed of my sins.’

‘If you are not ashamed, then God will not pardon you and you will go to hell,’ remonstrated Father Garcia.

‘You misjudge God,’ returned Josef. ‘Before I sin I always go down
on my knees and ask God how much He minds, and He has never prevented me.’

Father Garcia’s lugubrious face lightened with a smile, and he said, ‘Let us begin the confession.’

‘I once fucked the niece of the policeman in Chiriguana after she had been sold to Pedro the grocer, and she was only twelve years old but she fucked like a rabbit, so I did it many more times. I threw a bottle of Anis Ocho Hermanos over Hectoro during the battle of
Doña Barbara
, which was a sinful waste of money and good liquor, and it stung his eyes. I once gave a spoonful of rum to a crying baby to make it shut up, and it nearly died. I stole a reel of barbed wire from the hacienda of Don Hugh of Chiriguana when we still lived down on the plain. I took an unbranded calf from Don Emmanuel and raised it as my own. I spent so much time thinking about dying that sometimes I forgot to live, and when I was very young I masturbated myself every day for three years until a woman took pity on me and made me into a man. Apart from that I have done only one or two bad things every day.’

Father Garcia absolved him and administered the last rites amid an increasingly oppressive atmosphere of piety and impending doom, and Don Salvador solemnly intoned the whole of Catullus’ poem about the death of his Lesbia’s sparrow.

Ten hours later Josefs fever was causing him periods of delirium, and his body was formidably bloated. He awoke from his dreams and beckoned urgently to Father Garcia, who leaned down to catch his words: ‘In Chiriguana I paid Don Ramón the cura, for a proper burial in a coffin and three masses. Will you do it even though I have not paid any money to you?’

‘I will do it on behalf of the Church,’ said Father Garcia gravely, ‘which has already received the money.’

Josef beckoned again and once more Father Garcia leaned down: ‘Will I be able to fuck in heaven as much as I want? Because otherwise I wish you to arrange for me to go somewhere else.’

‘A priest has limited powers of negotiation,’ observed Garcia, ‘but it is my opinion that if one could not fuck in heaven, then it would not be heaven, which is a contradiction in terms and therefore impossible. It would be a metaphysical oxymoron. That is something I learned from you, as it was always your opinion.’

Josef looked gratified, and then murmured, ‘I have a last wish. I want to be buried with the rest of my leg, and I want to die drunk.’

Josef expired at midnight, deeply comatose from the rum, a puro cigar still smouldering between his fingers. Out of love and respect the people left him in the middle of the floor whilst they drank and whored, and others came in and out bringing burial presents. Dolores brought a bowl of Pollo de un Hombre Verdadero as tribute to his virility, Felicidad came in with tears in her eyes, leaving him the black sequinned stockings that used to make him drool and arouse him to ribaldry, Sergio brought him a decorated gourd from which to drink firewater in paradise, Hectoro brought him four pitillos crammed with the best marijuana, and Doña Constanza brought him her ancient copy of
Vogue
with the tantalising pictures of semi-naked white women in impractical clothing. Tomás brought him coca leaves to chew in case there were mountains to climb in heaven, Gloria brought him four bullets to commemorate his role in driving the Army away from the old village, and Pedro brought in a stillborn puppy from one of his hunting dogs, to help him in the celestial chase.

They buried Josef deep beneath the floor of the whorehouse so that he could listen to the familiar tumult and have copas of aguardiente poured over his resting place at moments of sentimentality and nostalgia. The burial was somewhat delayed by the absence of his lower limb, which Pedro and Sergio had left on the plateau in the urgent rush to bring him back up to the town. This severed item had been carried off by an opportunistic puma, and all that turned up in Leticia Aragon’s hammock was the foot that the puma had detached to give to her cubs. It was intact but covered with the tiny pinpricks of their teeth. Eventually the eloquent and squint-eyed policeman whose niece Josef had pleasured had the idea of fashioning a wooden part to complete the corpse’s anatomy, and thus Josef was consigned to the soil with all his presents, fully equipped for a riotous and fulfilling afterlife.

Josef’s unjustly premature taking off had the consequences that from then on people who visited the plateau always smoked cigars with great vehemence, since snakes hate tobacco, and on their feet they rubbed a concoction of snakeroot, garlic, and sweet oil, which snakes find deeply offensive. The one was for protection, the other for revenge

On the night of Josef’s death Aurelio called in on Francesca and found her weeping in the arms of Capitan Papagato, her husband. He closed the door softly behind him, and said, ‘I have come to give you some news. When your child is born, you must not call him Josef, as you have been thinking. You must call him Federico, after your brother, the husband of my daughter Parlanchina.’ He answered their questioning gaze with the remark, ‘Some things are fate, because of the gods.’

He went out into the night and walked up the street. He stopped briefly by the axle-pole in the plaza and looked up at the stars. When he came into the sierra from the arboreal canopy of the jungle he was always startled into admiration by the immensity of the sky. He sat down and thought about how Parlanchina too had begun to fade away. These days she merely stood still by the path in the jungle, her beautiful long hair washing about her waist, her soft eyes empty and dreaming. He had seen that her child was fading also, and her capricious pet ocelot was curled at her feet, its vibrant spots and rosettes phasing in and out of focus.

Aurelio walked on to the door of Leticia Aragon, and knocked lightly. She appeared shortly, as naked as the snow, as if she had known that there was someone there who would not be astonished. Aurelio studied her beauty; her eyes were now sea-green, and her fine black hair fell upon her shoulders like a familiar caress. He suddenly wondered whether she had always been Parlanchina’s mother, and was utterly smitten by a sense of the ineffable. Leticia smiled remotely and told him: ‘I know that I am pregnant again.’