The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (55 page)

It was wonderful. As usual, Beethoven played gently in order to drown out the intestinal rumbles of his executive bowels. He took off his trousers because when he was a little boy a jet of urine had once squirted under the rim of the seat and discomfitingly wetted his underwear where it had lain crumpled about his feet, and he sat down wearily. He had the reassuringly familiar thought that one of these days he must get the seat upholstered, or an electrical warming-coil installed.

‘I was very right and wise,’ he said to himself as his intestines released more of the malodorous and sloppy aftermath of his visit to Egypt. He began to feel equal to the task of facing the impeachment, and commenced to compose long and noble speeches in which he defended his lengthy absence on the grounds of the national interest, to the gentle and arpeggiated rhythm of the Moonlight Sonata.

He consigned the paper to the pedal bin and stood up to flush the chain. He was rewarded with a dry clanking noise that left the evidence of his activities entirely undisturbed. He pulled again, with as little result.

No president in the world, even one facing impeachment, feels able to leave evidence such as there lay in that lavatory bowl; it would have been so demeaning as to be even more unacceptable than to be caught naked in a public place with a little boy on the end of one’s virile member. Even assassination would be preferable.

He scratched his head and wondered how it was that a cistern might dry out, even from disuse. He lowered the protective cover of the seat and climbed up on it in order to peer inside the reluctant tank and find out what was amiss.

Although a tall man, he could not see very well, and he went up on his tiptoes, lifting the scrolled and gilded metal lid. He leaned back to bring the flex of the light a little closer, and very suddenly the flimsy cover of the lavatory gave way beneath him.

Down he plunged. His feet slid with unerring accuracy around the bend at the bottom of the bowl, and he fell backwards, knocking his
head violently upon the tiles of the floor. When he awoke, he found his feet jammed and his knees compressed together in the hole in the cover. He attempted to raise himself up, but his backside was not upon the floor and his stomach was too weak to cope with the athletic contortions involved in such a manoeuvre. He put his fingers to the back of his head, and found a portentous lump burgeoning upon his occipital bone.

Throwing pride and dignity to the winds he began to yell, at first with stupendous vigour, but thereafter with a forlorn and pitiful hopelessness caused by the fact that the sound system was now thundering and reverberating with the last movement of the Choral Symphony.

It would not be until Madame Veracruz ran out of places in which to weep that she would be inspired to do so in the lavatory, on the other side of whose rococo door she would discern the despairing whimpers of her husband. He would finally be released by four smirking members of the palace guard in spiked helmets and full ceremonial dress, too late to attend the first of the impeachment hearings that were eventually to bring Foreign Secretary Lopez Garcilaso Vallejo to the presidency.

Garcilaso’s term of office was to be marked by his unusual dependence upon unminuted interviews with the Archangel Gabriel for advice, by the publication at the state expense of an omnibus edition of all his pseudonymous works upon the occult, and by the unprecedented proliferation of exotic foreign women with unpronounceable names living and cavorting in the many chambers of the palace.

But prior to all these momentous events the outgoing president lay in the lavatory vanquished by Beethoven, immobilised, with his own oily and fetid excrement lapping about the scrawny bones of his shins. Altogether it had been a most inauspicious week for His Excellency President Enciso
Veracruz.

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Published by Vintage 1998

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Copyright © Louis de Bernières 1992

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