The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (52 page)

From their great height they were able to look down upon the town of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. Its antique stones and tilting houses seemed so small as to have been modelled by a child, and below them the campfires of the crusaders, with their thin plumes twisting in the breeze, seemed to be the very image of tranquillity and innocence.

‘I could not stay behind,’ said Dionisio. ‘I was hardly needed there, since Fulgencia has everything organised like a German.’

‘You came here on your own?’ asked Misael, astounded, and unable to believe that anyone could have made this journey unassisted.

‘I took a short cut,’ he replied. ‘I climbed up the cliff at the north of town, and came along that ridge. I am surprised that none of you saw me, because I could see you very clearly.’

‘But the cliff leans outwards,’ exclaimed Misael, crossing himself, ‘Only the Devil could climb it.’

Dionisio poked him in the ribs good-humouredly. ‘There is a kind of chimney up it that makes it quite simple, amigo. Nonetheless, I cut my hands, as you can see.’ He held out hands that were a crisscross of cuts and tears, and Misael made a chirring noise with his tongue against his cheeks. ‘You are loco,’ he said, ‘but welcome to the party.’

The men retired behind the crest of the ridge so that they would not be seen, and only Pedro and Remedios remained, to discuss their tactics, and to gaze speculatively upon the multitude below. ‘How many are they?’ asked Pedro.

‘Maybe one thousand, maybe two. How does one judge?’

An unaccountable intuition stirred in Remedios’ mind, and she raised her head. ‘I thought I saw something move over there,’ she said, pointing. Pedro followed her gaze, and he too saw something. It was not that he saw anything in particular; what he observed was more like a suspicion of stealthiness, a sly motion in the corner of the eye, that disappeared upon the first attempt at focus. Remedios thought that she saw a black frond waving as it slipped behind a rock. She called Dionisio forward and told him to come and see. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

He placed the forefinger of one hand against the bunched tips of the thumb and forefinger of the other, and peered through the tiny aperture as he had been taught during his national service, when he had been involved in the futile expeditions against people like Remedios, always arriving after the guerrillas had already departed. He saw the tip of a black tail sway gracefully above a boulder, and flick out of sight. ‘It is the cats,’ he said delightedly. ‘They hate to cross open ground, and so they are moving like commandos, or bandits.’

‘If you can bring them here,’ she said, ‘then we are no longer outnumbered.’

Dionisio put his hands to his temples and uttered a silent call deep within. In the infinite void of his mind he heard a response, a deep and guttural cough, a growl.

Bounding over the rocks, oblivious to the fear of unenclosed spaces, the cats flowed in a velvet stream over the hillsides, almost comical in
the abandonment of their leaping and their clumsy trotting, the only speed at which a cat loses its dignity and grace.

Into the camp they came, sniffing for their own people, hungry for sweet titbits, rolling over on their backs in the anticipation of the rough play that in men passes for affection. Dionisio’s own two cats came and sat by him, cleaning their paws as if nothing had happened, feigning indifference, as if to punish him for his absence.

Father Garcia levitated in ecstasy for the first time since his friend Don Salvador had been so brutally and summarily cut down. ‘See, see,’ he shouted from his station above the mountain, ‘I was right; the saints are not on the other side.
Jubilate!
Mother of Divine Grace, pray for us. I was right, I was right! Seat of Wisdom, pray for us, Cause of Our Joy, pray for us. I was justified.’

‘Either that, or the exorcism was half-baked,’ commented Hectoro.

‘Which one is that?’ asked Dionisio, pointing at a portly she-jaguar with a benign expression that was sporting about its neck a huge, exorbitant, and incongruous pink bow, spattered with mud, very bedraggled, but plainly made of silk. ‘I do not know this one,’ he said, ‘and I know all the cats of the town.’

‘Who cares?’ said Remedios, and tartly she added, ‘We should give the bow to Doña Constanza, since she enjoys such frivolities.’

They held their last council of war, and passed that night in the bitter cold of the uplands warmed by the voluptuous heat of the cats, soothed by their aroma of strawberries and hay, lulled by their sonorous and extravagant purring, and at last convinced that the unseen world had not turned its face against them.

Nonetheless, very few of them slept.

AT THE IMMINENT
prospect of battle one experiences a wild excitement that precludes rationality. But in the boredom of waiting for it, one’s mood changes. The excitement transforms itself into a kind of thoughtfulness that is solitary, but which requires the reassuring presence of others; people offer each other cigarettes in low voices, and when they pat each other’s backs, their touch feels the need to linger. Some write notes or poems that will be found upon them after the event of their death, detailing regrets and previously unacknowledged longings. Others pass the time dismantling, cleaning, and reassembling weapons that are already in immaculate condition. They pass handfuls of ammunition from one pocket to another, weighing up the best way to distribute it for ease of access. Others walk about with their hands in their pockets, smiling wanly, and with genuine affection, even at those who have always annoyed them intensely. Everyone looks at the world with a heightened acuity, as though perceiving for the first time the globular abdomen of an ant, or the porous texture of snow.

Just before the battle one’s guts sink, and breathing becomes difficult. One is now in the kingdom of absolute fear, a place where fingers tremble too deeply to light a cigarette, and where the bladder needs urgently to empty itself every ten minutes. Everyone looks around for escape, knowing that it is impossible because everybody else is watching, and because ultimately one’s honour is one’s only inalienable possession. Some break down and weep into their hands.

All these stages were travelled through during the long night by those who waited upon the mountain. But when the word ran through the camp that it was time to go, then the last stage was reached, when the mind goes blank, one reacts without thinking, and in the surge of adrenalin one becomes almost a god.

There was long gulley down which they moved, out of sight, Remedios having learned, like the cats, the usefulness of broken ground. From there they fanned out amongst the rocks, crawling and
creeping, until they spanned the entire northern flank of the crusaders, giving themselves clear lines of fire against an enemy which had anticipated attack from the front.

A volley of shots crashed metallically, and Remedios threw up her hands in exasperation; it had been agreed that no one should fire until she herself had loosed the first round, and as yet her finger had not even taken up first pressure on the trigger. There was the sound of a terse command, and a second volley rang out. She raised her head and gazed petulantly along her own line, but she saw no drifting clouds of cordite.

Dionisio tapped her on the shoulder from behind, and pointed over to the eastern slope next to their own in the north. ‘It is the Army,’ he said. ‘At last they are doing something to aid us in this mess.’

Despite the previous help of General Hernando Montes Sosa in providing helicopters and engineers, Remedios still entertained deep suspicions about the Armed Forces against which her People’s Vanguard had struggled for so long. On this occasion she irrationally begrudged their ability to arrive and begin firing without her permission. She raised her Kalashnikov to her shoulder and fired down at the developing mayhem in the camp below, whereupon her own people followed suit. Dionisio tapped her on the shoulder again, and shouted in her ear, above the cacophony of the fusillades, ‘I am going to make contact with them.’

Remedios fired again, and said angrily, ‘Just tell them whose war this is.’

Taken by surprise, the ‘English’ down below were scurrying to their tents to fetch weapons, were attempting to run towards the city to get out of range, or were desperately seeking protected vantage points from which to return fire. Mgr Anquilar, demented with the exhilaration of a conflict which he genuinely mistook for Armageddon, wheeled upon his prancing and rearing black stallion, holding aloft his silver crozier, and shouting snatches of the Old Testament that were concerned with Samson’s slaughter of the Philistines and the defeat of the troops of Midian.

Meanwhile Dionisio renewed his reputation for fearlessness and invulnerability by crossing the open hillside that separated the Army from the men of the city. With his two black jaguars following at his heels, the thin soil spitting about his feet where the crusaders’ bullets
struck, he fixed his eyes upon his destination, and walked at an even pace, his fatalism greater than his fear. Afterwards the soldiers were to say with amazement in their voices that he had seemed a huge man, the absolute blueness of whose eyes could clearly be remarked at half a hundred metres.

He passed behind the first soldiers to where he surmised that he would find the commander. He saw a tall man, approaching thirty years of age, whose blond hair and erect carriage reminded him of someone from his past, who was giving instructions to a sergeant with elegant sweeps of the hand that were clearly indicative of a tactical decision. The sergeant ducked away, and the officer raised binoculars to his eyes to observe the enemy. ‘Felipe,’ said Dionisio, approaching him from behind and putting his hand upon his shoulder.

The officer lowered his binoculars and turned. His eyes widened with incredulity, a huge smile broke over his face, he threw his arms wide, exclaimed, ‘Dionisio!’ and enclosed him in a deeply felt embrace. ‘Shit,’ said Colonel Felipe Moreno, ‘I never thought I would see you again. What the hell are you doing here?’

‘I live over there in that city,’ said Dionisio, pointing towards Cochadebajo de los Gatos. ‘My father told me that you were now the youngest colonel in the army. Congratulations.’

‘For what it is worth,’ replied Felipe, ‘I may be a colonel, but they sent me on this expedition with only one other officer, a perfect idiot with a block of wood where his head should be, and they have given me one company where I should have had three.’

‘Are these the Portachuelo Guards?’ asked Dionisio, pointing at the earnest figures in khaki who were oblivious to all but their task of selecting their own target and firing at will.

‘Yes, thank God. If they had been conscripts they would have deserted months ago.’

‘Listen, Felipe, we must talk later. I have to tell you that on that slope, as you probably realise, we ourselves are attacking. Soon the women will come from the city and attack also, so do not shoot at them. Our plan was to run down and attack them with machetes when and if our ammunition runs out, since we do not have much.’

‘You people have balls,’ commented the officer.

‘That reminds me, our leader is a woman, Remedios, and she wants to be in charge, since this is our struggle more than it is yours.’

Felipe raised his eyebrows and smiled in the aristocratic manner that seems to be universal amongst the officer of élite corps around the world. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘we will fix bayonets and charge when we see you advance. My men have never had any genuine practice in it, and I cannot see the people down there lasting for very much longer in any case.’

As he crossed back to his own lines with bullets streaking past his head, Dionisio could think only of the time when he had gone reluctantly with Anica to a bar in Valledupar. With them had been her brother, whom he had hated on sight for his good looks, his self-confidence, and the mere fact that he was a successful young officer in the proudest regiment of the Army. Dionisio loathed the Army because of his national service; he hated the obsession with details, hierarchy and formality. To him it was a hideous expense in a country starved of the means of life. He remembered with a wry smile how, in a couple of hours, he had become so close to Felipe that afterwards Anica had complained of not having been able to get herself heard all evening. The memory of that occasion warmed him, but the picture of Anica toying with her glass as the two men discussed democracy also opened up an incurable wound in his heart. He knew suddenly why it was that he took no precautions against the bullets.

‘The officer is under your orders,’ he said briefly to Remedios, and he went to call all the cats together, determined not to repeat his previous mistake of succumbing to his principled humanity.

The Spanish soldiers under the leadership of the Conde Xavier de Estremadura, the lover of Remedios, and Fulgencia Astiz at the head of the women, emerged from the city and crossed the drawbridge. They separated into two columns, since the Conde had refused to be commanded by a woman. She had disdainfully riposted with a remark to the effect that she would do anything rather than rely upon a man. Despite their altercation, they were now beginning their advance upon the enemy, from the very side from which an attack had been originally expected, but which had now become the enemy’s rear. But they covered barely more than a hundred metres, for two reasons.

In the first place they came upon those who had fled towards the
city in order to escape the inferno of crossfire at the far end of the valley. Cowardice on the part of the enemy had never entered into the strategic calculations of the council of war, and for a minute Fulgencia was both outraged by it and nonplussed. But it was not long before the Spanish soldiers were poking their rusted rapiers into crevices and hiding holes, and the women were heartlessly firing into the backs of those who were fleeing once more for their own lines, or attempting to scale the unsupported mud of the andenes in their attempt to escape.

In the second place, a cloud billowed down from the peak above the city, and another swelled simultaneously from the valley to the south. Down they rolled, obscuring everything, leaving freezing droplets of condensation upon the barrels of the guns, and enveloping the world in a grey and sodden twilight. ‘Shit!’ yelled a voice that was plainly Hectoro’s, and another that was Misael’s said, ‘Do not worry, it will lift in a minute. It always does.’