The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (47 page)

INES AND AGAPITA
arrived in Cochadebajo de los Gatos two days after the carrier pigeon that had been left with them by Pedro the Hunter. Footsore, dirty and exhausted, but overflowing with the righteous pride of a mission successfully prosecuted, they crossed the drawbridge over the moat, and went straight to the plaza, as by habit do all people who arrive in a town. They sat themselves down with their backs to the great axle-pole, emptied in gulps the last draughts of springwater from their gourds, and waited for Dionisio to pass by and notice them.

Everything had gone exactly according to plan. Dionisio had been right that the crusaders would avoid Ipasueño owing to the presence there of civil authorities, and would choose Santa Maria Virgen as the obvious place to ‘evangelise’ on the way to Cochadebajo de los Gatos. Accordingly the people of that pueblito had moved themselves and their possessions over the hill and into the neighbouring valley, leaving only the two girls to keep watch for the crusaders. When these latter arrived in Santa Maria Virgen, they found what seemed to be a ghost town, abandoned as mysteriously as the
Marie Celeste.
They also found numerous notices pinned up on the doors of the houses: ‘No entry: purple fever, paludismo, and pneumonic plague’ all carefully written by Felicidad in the flowing italic script practised by doctors, who are trained at college to believe that fine cursive handwriting lends credibility to their diagnoses and creates confidence in their prescriptions. Against the shed where Dionisio’s ancient vehicle was tended, the girls had pinned a sign that said ‘Quarantine Room’, and at the first sound of the chanting priests they had crept over the hillside to inform the villagers before releasing the carrier pigeon and setting off in its wake for Cochadebajo de los Gatos.

The panic of the crusaders upon encountering a plague town which had apparently been evacuated did little credit to their faith. As though of one mind, they retreated in disorder and passed it by on
the western side, thus ensuring that when they arrived in Cochadebajo de los Gatos they would be utterly fatigued and unprovisioned.

On their first night outside Santa Maria Virgen, they found themselves the victim of an attack by the renegade spirits of the dead, who were in fact the villagers banging spoons on saucepans, whooping eerily, and rolling rocks down the mountainside onto the nests of bivouacs. On the second night, after a hard day’s march from dawn to dusk in order to distance themselves from the mountain devils, they encamped upon a wide swath of grass that transformed itself miraculously into a freezing bog when it rained during the night.

‘These are like old times,’ said Hectoro, narrowing his eyes against the smoke of his puro as he peered out from behind the large boulder where he was concealed alongside Pedro the Hunter and Misael. Hectoro had dismounted reluctantly from his horse, and had tethered it farther round the mountain, but he still wore his creaking leather bombachos and his heavy-calibre revolver.

‘These are indeed like old times,’ replied Misael, who had blacked over his sparkling gold tooth in the interests of nocturnal camouflage, ‘but it is a pity that on this occasion we have no snakes and alligators to put into their tents.’

‘Aurelio’s herbs will work just as well,’ said Pedro, putting his hand into his mochila and scrunching the dried plants in his fist. ‘I have seen before what happens when animals eat them.’

‘We should just shoot them,’ said Hectoro, ‘and our troubles would be over.’

Pedro and Misael exchanged glances, mutually understanding that Hectoro had a carefully nurtured reputation for machismo to preserve. But he also had a sense of honour, and so, to deter him from rash action, Misael said, ‘No, compadre, it is dishonourable to attack before one is attacked. And besides, a war is no good for anything unless there is some ingenuity in it. Otherwise what tale is there to tell afterwards? “We shot at them and they shot at us, and then we retreated and then we attacked.” It amounts to nothing. It is better to be remembered for brains.’ He tapped the side of his head to indicate intelligence, and winked.

‘A man wishes to be remembered for his balls,’ riposted Hectoro.

‘It seems to me that the best plans require both,’ observed Pedro, ‘as tonight will prove.’

When night settled abruptly upon the encampment the three men were sound asleep beneath their saddle-blankets, with their sombreros tipped forward over their eyes, and only their ears awake for footsteps. Hectoro had mastered the ultimate masculine art of smoking whilst asleep, and a cigar smouldered between his lips at the corner of his mouth, its glow brightening at each gentle intake of breath. It would extinguish itself at a distance of exactly two centimetres from his lips at the point where the ash encountered the saliva that had soaked up from the tip. Hectoro believed that in this way he could ensure vigorous and satisfying dreams about heroic exploits, women, and the successful roping of steers.

Two hours before dawn the three men awoke at the same time, having agreed to do so beforehand, and took fortifying swigs from a bottle of Ron Caña in order to banish the impenetrable cold that could keep a man determinedly tucked up in his tent even when his bladder was weeping for relief. They pressed their sombreros down upon their heads, parcelled out Aurelio’s jungle herbs, shook hands solemnly, embraced, and set off down the mountainside to their allocated corners of the encampment.

No one can say that their efforts were unrepaid. They watched with merriment as, in the morning, the crusaders attempted to control the horses and mules that had gratefully eaten the aromatic grasses from the outstretched palms of the three conspirators. The animals, enduring terrifying hallucinations about gigantic predators, kicked out and bit at any who approached. Mgr Anquilar’s horse, mistaking him for a vulture with dubious intentions, threw him to the ground in an elegant arc that left him bruised and muttering blasphemies for which he would normally decree ten Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. Brother Valentino was taken for a large puma by a mule that tore the bridle from his hands and set off for the horizon. The army of holy warriors lost half of the mules that formed their recuas, and most of their horses, in the prodigious stampede that ensued from the animals’ delusions of persecution, and were obliged to proceed to Cochadebajo de los Gatos carrying their supplies upon their own bowed backs.

Thus there augmented amongst the crusaders the suspicion that was never to leave them, that the divine favour was being progressively withdrawn, and only two factors kept them going. One was
Mgr Rechin Anquilar’s insistence to the priests that the Lord was testing them and would judge them according to how well they met the test, and the other was the conviction amongst the soldiery that they would have to press forward to Cochadebajo de los Gatos, because if they turned back they would starve before they reached anywhere that could be pillaged. Never far from their minds were the prospects of the plenty of that city, with its beautiful and legendarily willing girls, and its pharaonic stores of food. Their own bedraggled and abused band of camp-followers they abandoned, leaving them behind to perish in the impossible cold of the night, the horizontal rain of the high places, and the perilous shale of the invious mountain passes.

Mgr Rechin Anquilar already hated the sierra. In the foothills he had looked down across a vast panorama of lushly vegetated hills and had received the impression of overwhelming femininity. The hills were like an abominable agglomeration of rounded breasts shamelessly naked to the suckling sky. Their fecundity and innocence reminded him of native women sunbathing upon a sandbank, unconscious or uncaring of their curves and mounds that made a man’s hands twitch with the instinct to caress and to surrender. Higher yet there were gorges that he could not look upon without seeing that unfathomable wound between a woman’s legs that made him shudder with disgust and fascination, and which at school he had learned from his peers would smell of fish, being full of intricate folds of slimy dark pink excrescences of fungal shape and texture. The vast and placid lakes set between the stony grey shores of the high valleys reminded him of those orders of contemplative nuns whose unbreakable stillness and serenity enraged his disputatious universe of words and expositions, and the vistas of wispy brown shrubs were unmistakably akin to the conformation of pubic hair. The sierra brought the Monsignor’s deeply ingrained misogyny to a delirium of hatred as he cursed the mists that descended suddenly and, like a woman’s reasoning, fogged the mind as much as the vision. All that intoxicated him was the conviction that here in the sierra he grappled daily with the wiles of demons. His sense of purpose clarified and grew until he was veritably a man who, like so many before him, would know no peace until he had drowned evil in its own blood.

When he arrived before those mighty ramparts of interlocking
stone and found himself excluded by a drawbridge and a moat, he was the only one of the multitude who felt no sense of preordained defeat. He smacked his palm with his fist, jubilant at the thought of the last mighty battle with the legions of the dark, whilst his own legions, fractious, hungry, worn out and embittered, looked at one another and shook their heads with weariness.

There were no tables brought out, laden with food. There were no civil authorities declaring a fiesta, no gentle priest offering the use of the church, no pious widows kneeling to ask his blessing. There would be no impressive trials and executions, no women to violate and lacerate, no apocalyptic sermons, and no laying to waste and looting. There would be only the cold of the night and the long nothingness of day. A collective sigh of disappointment blew through their hearts, because before them lay only an impossibility, and behind them lay a retreat that would be nothing but a greater hardship.

As they stood before that monolithic wall they saw people begin to emerge from behind it and walk along the top, all of them women. They were Dolores and Consuelo, together with all the other whores of the town, who had arrived to do nothing other than to mock them in their misery. Dressed in their finest and richest clothes they paraded back and forth, swinging their hips and pulling ugly faces at them, as do schoolchildren. They stuck their middle fingers in the air in a graphic imitation of copulation, they thumbed their noses and protruded their tongues, and at the top of their lungs they yelled out obscene invitations and insults. ‘Vamos, Commadres!’ called Dolores, and all in a line they raised their skirts and displayed their unclothed nether parts to the infuriated and humiliated crusaders.

Suddenly there was a commotion as Felicidad joined her erstwhile sisters-in-arms. In front of them all she too paraded, caressing her own breasts lasciviously, licking her lips with her sly little tongue in a breathtaking display of what delights could be perpetrated by them. She stood sideways, flung back her long black hair, and pouted in a delicious caricature of the pose of models on the covers of men’s magazines. She ran her hands up her legs, raising her hems to just that point where one yearns for more, and she blew sarcastic and contemptuous kisses with such salacious virtuosity that every man
who watched her declared that they had shrunk back into their own souls as a snail seeks its carapace.

Felicidad turned her back on the warriors and priests, and it was as though, in the eclipse of her dark and vibrant beauty, the sun had left the heavens and the stars been extinguished. But she inched her skirts upwards with the coy expertise of a stripper, and stuck out her backside. It was the most rounded, most pert, most exquisite, most honey-coloured, most naked and velvet backside in the history of the world, and she was revolving it slowly, dipping with it, stroking it with her slender hands, looking backwards over her shoulder with an expression of desire so absolute that it could have melted candles and ignited tapers in every nunnery in the land.

One crusader felt his mouth go dry. ‘My God, she is a furnace,’ he said, with awe in his voice, ‘I could leap into that and die.’

But Mgr Rechin Anquilar could no longer withstand the cruelty of that vision of an unobtainable but demoniac paradise. Furious with mortification, the honour of his manhood and the dignity and prestige of his station mortally offended, he grabbed the rifle of a man near by, raised it to his shoulder, and fired.

He missed, but the first shot of the war had been fired in Cochadebajo de los Gatos, and nothing could now recall it or prevent the conflagration.

THE COUNCIL OF
war was convened in the whorehouse on the same evening as Felicidad’s adorable backside had narrowly escaped a horrible fate. ‘They cannot send me out to infect everyone with clap, now,’ she said, ‘because in the first place I no longer have it, and in the second place I would be shot by the man who looks like a vulture, and in the third place I do not trust Don Emmanuel to be good whilst I am away. So I am staying behind this wall.’

Hectoro stroked his conquistador beard and said, ‘We still have the two machine guns that we took from the Army. We should go up on the wall and blow away their balls, just like this.’ He raised his hand and clicked his thumb and forefinger.

Dolores placed her glass upon the table so emphatically that some of the rum spilled upon it. ‘You stupid men used up all the ammunition during the grand candomble and the fiesta aferwards. You took them up on the mountain and you were firing like madmen at nothing.’ She spat onto the ground to indicate the immaturity and irresponsibility of men in general.

Hectoro looked at her and replied, ‘A woman’s opinion is of no account.’ He saw Remedios glowering at him, and added, ‘Unless she is Remedios, who is as good as any man.’

Misael passed his hand over his brow, and said with resignation in his voice, ‘The fact is, compañeros, that we have very little ammunition of any kind. We used up most of it when we first arrived and were obliged to go hunting for meat, and we have never replaced it. We will have to be very careful of that which we have.’