The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  His eyes were so forcibly blue that that was all that many who met him could remember afterwards in a land that was brown-eyed almost to the last citizen. ‘His eyes see God,’ they would say, and it was true that he never seemed to be looking at the ground for his next foothold, that his eyes did not flick from one thing to another, did not blink, did not seem to reflect his moods. In truth what his eyes saw was the vision in his imagination of a brief time when he had known a kind of happiness that could poison a life for its impossibility of repetition. Everywhere he saw Anica; he saw her honey mulatta skin, her legs so long that they seemed to end in the heavens. He saw the green shirt knotted below her breasts, and the soft flat expanse of her stomach. At the edge of his eye he saw her creeping up on him as she had used to do when she wanted to playfight. He wore her ring upon his little finger and sometimes would sit and contemplate the refractions of the stone as it caught the sunset or the light of noon. It was as if she were somewhere inside that tiny but infinite space, and he was imprisoned forever in the wide world.

  Dionisio Vivo wore his hair quite long these days, in memory of Ramón Dario who used to cut it for him in the days before he too was tortured to death by Pablo Ecobandodo’s assassins. He carried Ramón’s police pistol stuck through his belt, and like Ramón, always carried a slim cigar in the barrel to give away as a present to anyone who showed him a favour or took his liking. Apart from this he habitually wore only a long-tailed shirt, and Acahuatec sandals made with leather thongs threaded through a sole sliced out of a car tyre. It was commonly said that he walked like an Indian, talked with the tongue of an angel, made love like an incubus, and slept with the clarity of wakefulness. It was also known that he was a brujo of stupendous power, equal perhaps to Aurelio and to Pedro the Hunter, but not the kind of brujo who cures warts and locates lost lovers and goats. Dionisio was only capable of the spectacular.

  It had been his extraordinary ‘Requiem Angelico’ which had enabled him to give up his post, for the piece had become so popular that it brought him a steady income to supplement that from the weekly page that he now wrote for La Prensa upon any subject that took his fancy. It would be without exaggeration to say that he was now the most celebrated journalist in the country on the strength of this page and on account of the series of letters that he had once written to the same newspaper during the time of the coca war. It would also be true to say that his journalism did not in the least reflect the legend that he had become; it was cogent, humane, and urbane in the manner of the serious press in Europe or in Colombia, and there was not a trace in it of the suprarational world he had come to inhabit.

  He quickly became a familiar sight in Cochadebajo de los Gatos. This was not on account of his two enormous pet jaguars, for in that city there were many such cats roaming free, all of them entirely tame. It was more on account of the natural manner in which he seemed to enter the life of that part of the people who had assumed leadership with common consent but without election; Pedro the Hunter, with his pack of silent dogs and his clothes made of animal skins; Father Garcia, with his gentle conscience, his wild metaphysical ideas, and his appearance of a depressed hare; Misael, with his honest black face and his love of revelry; Remedios, with her Kalashnikov and her gift of military acumen; Josef, with his ability to find compromises that accommodated everybody’s plans; Hectoro, who had three wives, never dismounted from his horse except to drink or make love, and looked every inch a conquistador; Consuelo and Dolores, the two whores who reminded the men that they were not gods on account of the possession of testicles; Aurelio, the Aymara Indian who crossed the veils between this and the other worlds and seemed to be in every place at the same time; and General Fuerte, who had deserted the army by faking his own death, and who logged in his notebook everything that was to do with lepidoptery, ornithology, and the mores of the people.

  But it was with none of these that Dionisio first made friends. He was drawn naturally to the teacher, Profesor Luis, a gifted improviser of pedagogical techniques, who knew how to make infallibly right-angled triangles with three pieces of string and who could explain everything in the world with the aid of what he found providentially upon the mountain slopes and in the gutters. It was Profesor Luis who made the windmills that generated electricity to fill the car batteries which illuminated the headlamps hanging from people’s ceilings and ran the gramophone in the whorehouse. It was he who calculated the necessary height of the levees that kept the river in check, and who used a pole and a protractor to work out how wide the terraces should be that rose up upon the slopes of the sierra, along with their best angle of inclination for the purposes of irrigation.

  Dionisio spent many evenings with Profesor Luis, and Farides, his wife. She was a dedicated cook who would not permit her husband to enter the kitchen in case he infected it with disorder or uncleanliness. This caused him some distress since he was prevented from enjoying his evenings by a pervading sense of guilt that she was working and he was not. ‘Men,’ she said, ‘contaminate everything with maleness,’ and beneath the verdict of this sweeping condemnation he was obliged to spend his time hanging around in the doorway with a concerned expression whilst Farides skinned the guinea pigs and chopped the cassava.

  But when Dionisio arrived with a bottle under his arm and a puro up the barrel of his pistol, Profesor Luis was able to relax and reconcile himself to an evening of companionable silences and shared opinions, oblivious to the clattering of pans that normally reminded him of his wife’s contempt for a man’s daubings in the art gallery of cuisine. The two friends would sit with their feet on the table, furtively removing them if there were any sign of Farides being about to enter, or they would loll in hammocks slung from the posts that supported the roof. It was on one such occasion when they were unsuccessfully trying to work out how one blows smoke rings, that Dionisio remarked, ‘What this town needs is a tractor and a library, or maybe a bookshop.’

  ‘Indeed,’ replied Profesor Luis, ‘I am very proud of the fact that I have taught almost everybody to read.’

  ‘I have noticed,’ observed Dionisio, ‘that there is such a thirst for reading matter that people walk along reading the writing on cigarette packets over and over. I think I could very easily get hold of some books.’

  ‘And as for the tractor, which would be a miracle indeed, those of Don Emmanuel and Antoine remain buried in mud in the village of our origin. But I do not think it would be possible to get them here. Even if we repaired them on the spot, which we could not, they could be incapable of crossing the mountains as we did on foot.’

  ‘I know how to do it,’ said Dionisio.

  ‘Then we will. Look, I have blown a smoke ring.’

  11 The Submission Of The Holy Office To His Eminence (3)

  I said, You shall call me father

  and never cease to follow me.

  But like a woman who is unfaithful to her lover,

  so you, Israel, were unfaithful to me.

  Jeremiah 3:19

  YOUR EMINENCE, WE submit this section as the third and final part of our report upon the state of the nation’s spiritual health, and we take the liberty of appending an addendum, outlining what action we consider should be taken in the light of our findings.

  But to commence, we examine the phenomenon of heretical belief. In order to do this we have been constrained to define our terms by delimiting exactly what is meant by the word ‘heresy’. Tertullian (De Praescriptione Hereticorum, C. 200 AD) defines it as a doctrine that cannot be found in the original teaching of the apostles. We have consulted the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles of St Thomas Aquinas, noting that he was the first of the Doctors to maintain that heresy was a sin ‘meriting not merely excommunication, but death also’ (an opinion no more, we hope, embraced by the Church). We have consulted the Bull Ad Abolendam of Pope Lucius III (1184), but most particularly the proceedings of the Lateran Councils, beginning in 1215 under the pontificate of Innocent III. We noted Canon Three of the Fou
rth Lateran Council, which outlines the provisions to be taken against heresy, thus engendering the ‘Inquisition’, whose activities have proved to be the most shameful of all the shameful blots upon the history of our faith. We find in Pope Innocent’s actions solely the extenuating circumstance that he shared in the commonly held terror that the six hundred and sixty-sixth year of the Beast of the Apocalypse was imminent, in the form of Islamic encroachments into Christian territories. We contend that the very idea of inquisition is itself heretical in origin, since the first one recorded was during the reign of al Mamun (813–833). His ‘mihna’ was an Islamic institution whose function was to extract public confession that the Koran is the ‘created speech of God’. To conclude, we decided to adopt the definition of heresy as ‘a doctrine or body of doctrines held in opposition to the stated doctrine of the Catholic Church’. We pass over those opinions expressed by Protestant faiths and by the various sects of Islam, concerning ourselves solely with those held by people who profess their Catholicism. We leave it to Your Eminence to decide what is truly heretical and what is merely curious.

  We have discovered that most Christian heresies arise in the first place out of attempts to resolve the ‘problem of evil’. This is as true in our own day as it was in the days of St Bernard of Clairvaux and Raymond VI of Toulouse. Your Eminence will, we hope, pardon the desultory manner in which this section of our report wheels and circles back upon itself; he will understand that this is because we have been constantly obliged to return to the theme of how it is possible to reconcile the superabundance of evil in this world with the omnipotence and beneficence of God. That is, ‘unde malum?’

  Thus we relate different heretical opinions in the manner in which they were related to us, as stories and myths, and without expressing judgements or controverting them.

  We have heard that Satan involved in his fall other angels which were to become human souls. This explains why the soul is neither earthly nor perishable. We are ‘imprisoned angels, striving back towards the light’.

  We have heard that when Satan was defeated by Michael, he took one third of the angelic militia to earth, along with the sun, the moon, and the stars. In some versions, it was Satan who was the creator of the earth.

  We have heard that Satan was equal to God, a jealous neighbour, and that he waited for thirty-two years outside Heaven’s gate in order to show the angels a woman, and this is why they left Heaven. They rained down denser than rain for nine days and nine nights.

  We have heard that matter was created in co-operation between God and Satan so that they could have a ground upon which to do battle.

  We have heard that Satan was God’s child, and that therefore he is either (1) The Christ, (2) Greater than Christ, or (3) Christ’s lesser brother; that Satan is the child of a greater, infernal god; that Satan and Christ are the children of God by different mothers; that Christ is the result of Satan’s having seduced God’s wife; that Satan is really ‘the Laws of Nature’. We have heard that Satan is the creator god of Genesis, and that therefore the Old Testament Law of Moses is Satan’s Law. The New Testament is the ‘Good God’s’ Law. Therefore Moses, David, the patriarchs and prophets were Satan’s prophets. Moses was ‘an evil seducer’ who mixed some good laws in with the bad ones in order to disguise the evil of the bad ones. Others maintain that the prophets deliberately falsified the law, and others still that the prophets lived in a separate world from this one, so that their laws do not apply here. Such opinions explain the remarkable outbreak of anti-Semitism in Cucuta last year.

  Connected with this, we have heard that because John the Baptist was Elias, he was therefore an Old Testament prophet, and was therefore an adversary of Christ. Again in Cucuta they believe that his mother and father, as well as the angel of annunciation, were demons, and they refer to him scathingly as ‘the water porter’. Additionally we have heard claims that the Holy Trinity is earth, fire and wind.

  Many apocryphal texts have somehow gained circulation and credence here, and we have found copies of the Gospel According to St Thomas, the ‘Interrogatio Johannis’, the Vision of Isaiah, as well as an extraordinary plethora of modern ‘gospels’ written down by people who claim to have received them by revelation. Thus there is a Gospel of Isabel the Whore, who enjoins people not to eat beans because flatulence is deleterious to spiritual health. The Gospel of Ricardo of Rinconondo claims that Mohammed was a reincarnation of Christ, who had returned in order to lose his virginity, and the Gospel of Maria of Malaga claims that Christ was really a woman who formed the third part of a ‘Holy Trinity’, of whom the other two were Mary Magdalen and Mary, Mother of Jesus. Not only do such ‘gospels’ exist in written forms, there are also many evangels which have remained oral thus far, but which nonetheless have gained great currency. For example, there is a city called Cochadebajo de los Gatos, which does not even appear upon the maps. In this place the population practises santeria, but there is also an Indian named Aurelio in whom the people place great faith for his medical advice; much of his advice and philosophy is gained from Aymara Indian and Navante Indian mythology, and has syncretised with the beliefs even of ‘good Catholics’. In the same place there is a notable heresiarch, an unfrocked priest named Garcia, who leads a dissipated life and consorts with a false priest whose command of Latin extends no further than the lewder passages of Catullus and Ovid. This Garcia preaches a dualistic faith, and advocates self-indulgence and concupiscence as the means to salvation. He has gained literally thousands of followers all over that part of the sierra. In this he is not at all unique, for there are many others like him. Your Excellency will no doubt be aware of the phenomenon of Canudos in Brazil, where Antonio the Counsellor once gathered thousands of faithful who fought to the last drop of blood for their whimsical beliefs. We have the impression that there are many Antonio the Counsellors at work unnoticed in this country.

  We have heard that the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ were both angels, who merely appeared to be fleshly (the theory of the ‘corpus phantasticum’); that she became pregnant through her ear; that she was a sinful woman of the flesh, or even a prostitute; that she was really a male named ‘Marinus’.

  Of Christ we have heard that he was merely a man, of sinful flesh, because only the fleshly may come to earth; that there were two Christs, one fleshly with Mary Magdalene as his concubine, who was crucified and suffered on earth, and that the other one was without sin, neither ate nor drank, was unfleshly, and was crucified in the invisible world; that Christ’s death was a scandalous defeat at the hands of Satan, who still therefore reigns here; that he reopened the path to heaven for his fellow fallen angels; that his miracles were black magic, and he a sorcerer; that he died upon the cross in each of the seven heavens; that he could not suffer or die, and therefore it was a demon that died in his place.

  We have heard that earth is a penitence for fallen angels, and that when we die we are tormented by demons into transmigrating into another body, the new host depending upon one’s degree of merit. They prove reincarnation on account of numerous stories such as that of someone remembering where they lost a shoe in their past life as a horse, and the shoe turning up in that spot, as predicted. We have also heard that there is no resurrection at all in the flesh.

  We have heard that there is no purgatory, or that purgatory is nine times brighter than fire, that eighteen angels transport the good through it, spending one day in each of the seven heavens. In heaven there are pastures, savannahs, jungles, and birdsong. There is no hunger nor leprosy, and people don a ‘robe of light’ and reclaim the crowns that they wore before their fall as Satan’s angels.

  We have heard that there is no free will; one is an angel or devil by predestination, and therefore repentance and attempts to behave well are pointless. This doctrine is justified by divine foreknowledge, and is used to license absolute libertinism, even including incest.

  We have heard that all sacraments practised by a sinful priest are null and void, and t
hat this is backdated to all sacraments made previously. Thus people will flock to be rebaptised when they perceive that their priest has sinned.

  Of carnal matters it is said that marriage is ‘demoniac’ and that married congress is ‘legalised fornication’; this means that it is equally sinful to be married or to indulge in premarital intercourse, which justifies the latter, as one is condemned to sinfulness in either case.

  People have invented strange prohibitions of their own, having found a heterogeneous collection of things to be satanic. Thus there are persons who will not eat flesh because the Devil created it, nor cheese, nor eggs, nor milk, but they will eat fish, because it is ‘the spontaneous product of water’. Many will swear no oaths, citing Matthew 5: 33–37, which means that they will not get married because they will not make the vows. For the same reason they refuse to become godparents. For others, insects, fish and lice are diabolical, as are serpents, frogs, toads, lizards and mice. There are cohorts of mendicants who refuse to work on the grounds that it prospers a world made by the Devil. They become formidably parasitic upon the ignorant poor, who nonetheless support them gladly. Some of these consider eating to be work, and they starve themselves to death in order to reprove the flesh.

  Amongst the more curious beliefs that we have found to be current are these: that Pontius Pilate paid interest upon Judas’ forty pieces of silver; that it is very good luck to wear the Gospel of St John upon the top of the head; that only those who are perfect may say the Pater (thus most people never say it at all, and block their ears at the points in the service where it occurs); that God created evil in order to have something against which He might comprehend Himself; that one has to plunge oneself into evil in order to understand and overcome it; that Heaven will only come when the last soul is saved, including that of Satan himself.