The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  Concepcion’s heart sank, and her face fell, but she said, ‘Yes, Master,’ in a low whisper that betrayed her trepidation. ‘And what if he gets worse but is not cured afterwards?’

  The brujo shook his head and stroked the grey strands of his beard. ‘I will have to come to him and fight with the demons, and I might have to fight with him too, to shake his soul back into his body.’

  ‘You cannot,’ said Concepcion, ‘he is a priest.’

  The brujo laughed so that the lack of his front teeth caught Cristobal’s attention and momentarily distracted him from swivelling his finger in his ear. ‘I can come all the same,’ replied the brujo.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Concepcion. ‘Look, I have brought you some oranges and a chicken.’

  ‘I cannot accept payment; my power would wash away in the rain.’

  ‘It is not payment, it is a gift.’

  ‘Then thank you, and Chango guard you with his thunder and Oshun preserve your beauty. Here is the medicine.’

  Concepcion left the hut and went out into the mud of the favela. Across the floor of the valley could be seen the fair buildings of the capital, with the government blocks and the Hilton Hotel rising up above the colonial houses, most of whose façades had been replaced with plate-glass shopfronts. She could see the Cardinal’s palace to one side, and noticed that the perpetual drizzle was drifting in that direction. She thought of His Eminence tutting irritably and moving his chair from the lawns and into the cloister.

  On the mountainsides she saw the ‘villas miserias’, sometimes referred to euphemistically as ‘new towns’, that ringed the city and made visitors reflect that the wealth of the centre was somehow obscene by comparison. She stood for a minute and observed the section of it in which she found herself. A twelve-year old prostitute whose frequent coughs produced clots of blood that congealed around her doorway was waiting for customers who were too poor to pay her in anything other than plastic gewgaws and insults. A naked child was being washed in the rain by someone who might have been her sister but was probably an infant mother. A hydrophobic dog was being stoned from a safe distance by a small knot of drunks. It was reeling in circles, and any minute now it would fall over and consent to die. The cadaver of a cat lay in a mud-puddle, and a buzzard was circumambulating, working up a hunger. Higher up the slope a woman was wailing, probably because of a death or because of parturition. With his back against a shack, a man was defecating painfully with his trousers around his ankles. Cristobal watched with utter fascination. ‘That man is doing a poo,’ he announced, pointing.

  ‘Everyone poos,’ replied Concepcion.

  ‘Does the Cardinal?’

  ‘Even the Cardinal.’

  ‘I bet he doesn’t.’

  She sighed and took his hand, beginning the long walk down to the glossy shops where she could find a present for her lover, where she would inevitably be tempted to splash out on make-up, on shiny sentimental ornaments of animals, on necklaces depicting the miracles of saints. Inevitably, she would finger these things, feel their solidity and weight in her hands, and put them back on the shelves because a shop assistant would be eyeing her suspiciously. Then a white person would come in, and the same assistant would rush up unctuously and ask, ‘May I help you at all?’

  In the Calle Bolivar she came across a stall that was selling records. Bored with her search for the unformulated present, she stopped and idly flicked through the cardboard squares. She found ones from the United States, depicting men with long hair like devils, their faces painted into masks like those of Indians; she saw that they were all scowling or angry. There were ones with blonde semi-naked women on them in seductive poses, whose hair was piled up exorbitantly on their heads and whose armpits were as hairless as a little girl’s. There were pictures of groups of Negroes in sunglasses, their hair cut straight across the top so that the crowns of their heads looked like platforms. She showed one of the record covers to Cristobal. ‘If you carry on picking your nose, you will end up looking like that.’

  ‘Are they spacemen?’ he asked. ‘I want to be a spaceman, and when I die I want to be a hummingbird.’ He raised his arms and tried to flap them so fast that they blurred. ‘Do I look like one yet?’

  ‘Faster,’ said Concepcion. ‘At this rate you will only get to be a stork.’

  In amongst the vallenato records Concepcion came across a record that from top to bottom and from back to front announced its own gravitas. It bore a bust of a man with downturned lips and an expression of dour disapproval. She scanned the foreign writing and found no exclamation marks; His Eminence always said that the mark of seriousness and good style in writing is the lack of them. In large black letters the cover proclaimed ‘Beethoven: 3rd Symphony (Eroica)’ and Concepcion marvelled at the incomprehensibility of it. She held it up to the stallholder and asked, ‘Is this suitable for a serious rich man of high taste?’

  ‘That is all it is suitable for,’ rejoined the man. ‘I have had it for ten years and no one has bought it.’

  ‘I will buy it,’ she said quickly. ‘How much is it?’

  The stallholder saw the light of hopefulness in her eyes and the poverty of her clothes, and was overwhelmed with charity. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It was always yours and never mine. If you ever become ugly, then bring it back.’

  She clutched the precious item to her chest and tried not to cry with gratitude. She would go back and reclaim her mother’s ring from the Syrian.

  His Eminence removed the wrapping from the present and was touched. ‘I have not heard this since I was a young man,’ he said. ‘When I was nineteen I went with my brother, Salvador, the one who messed up at the seminary because of his taste in obscene poetry and then disappeared, and we heard this in Quito when we were in Ecuador. It was magnificent, and afterwards we came out in such high spirits that Salvador pretended to be Superman and he bounded along the street like an idiot, and I had the first theme running through my head for weeks.’

  ‘You like it then?’

  ‘I am delighted. How did you know I would like it?’

  She pulled a wry face and said, ‘I am not so stupid.’

  She went away to the kitchen to make pichones con petit-pois, and shortly heard the strains of Beethoven drifting through the cloisters and corridors. She stopped extracting the entrails of the pigeon and stood perfectly still. Something made her leave her cooking and creep upstairs, where she sat on the floor outside the Cardinal’s chamber, her arms wrapped about her knees. As she listened intently she began to weep without knowing it, and when the record was finished the Cardinal came out of his room and found her in the corridor with clean streaks descending her face where the grime of work had been washed away. She looked up at him and explained, ‘Querido, it was so beautiful, it was like making love.’

  30 Dionisio Unexpectedly Acquires Two More Lovers On The Way To See His Family

  DIONISIO SHUT UP his house and went out to look for his cats. He found one of them at Josef’s, where it was cadging panela from the latter’s wife, and the other he located behind the Palace of the Lords, where it was nostalgically making the kind of scrape that it would have done in the wild. ‘Venga, gatito,’ he said, and the great animal looked up at him innocently with its huge amber eyes. ‘Come along,’ said Dionisio, ‘we are going home.’ The black jaguar hesitated dubiously, and then followed its master, cuffing the other cat playfully about the ears and biting its neck. ‘It’s time you two grew up,’ said Dionisio, and proceeded to Sergio’s house.

  Capitan Papagato was there with Francesca, and everybody was admiring the nascent curves of her first pregnancy. Dionisio exchanged pleasantries upon the subject of children, and then he and Sergio went to the corral to rope the horse and saddle it. It had once belonged to Pablo Ecobandodo, universally known as ‘El Jerarca’, and was a spirited grey stallion that nowadays objected to being separated from its female companions and was therefore difficult to catch.

  Today was no exception. Sergio tem
pted it with a grenadillo while Dionisio crept up with the bridle, but at the last second it pricked up its ears, snorted, and triumphantly departed to the far end of the corral with the grenadillo safely installed between its molars. ‘Mierda,’ they both exclaimed, and Sergio said, ‘Why do you not command him?’

  Dionisio was famous for being able to communicate directly with animals, but he shook his head and replied, ‘It is all very well commanding him, but he will not obey. This is a truly Latino horse, amigo, and therefore he will work only when there is no choice. Believe me, he and I are old friends, and he knows that he is in for a long ride. Come here, caballo, or I will give all your fodder to a mule.’

  The horse laid back its ears and showed its teeth in that typical equine expression that looks like a demented smile, and trotted briskly back and forth along the end of the corral. He bit one of the mares on the backside and stood still with satisfaction as the mare kicked out at him. ‘We will have to lasso him,’ said Sergio.

  Nowadays most lassos are made of blue nylon rope, and the consequence of this progress is that horses are much harder to catch. The rope picks up permanent and intractable kinks that make it almost impossible to make a perfect loop with it, and furthermore it severely burns the hands if the horse should decide to run. But Sergio still used the old-fashioned kind that was made of twisted cowhide and formed generous circular loops, and with this he casually walked to within a few metres of the recalcitrant horse. The latter saw the lasso and shied back, so Sergio deliberately walked past him and made as if to launch the lariat at another horse. At the last minute he spun around and landed it neatly over the neck of the astonished stallion. ‘He is not very bright, is he?’ remarked Dionisio. ‘He falls for that one every time.’

  ‘Some people say that horses have no memory,’ observed Sergio, ‘but my opinion is that he likes to be caught. It is simply a matter of honour to appear to resist, and in this way a horse is very like a woman, eh cabrón? Except that no woman resists you, it seems.’ Sergio clicked his teeth and smiled salaciously.

  Once caught, the animal stood stock still as Dionisio placed the leather garra upon its back, heaved up the saddle, and then tightened the cinturon about its chest. As he put on the bridle the horse very deliberately stood on Dionisio’s foot and shifted his weight. ‘Ay, ay, ay,’ exclaimed Dionisio, pushing against the animal’s shoulders to make it move. ‘Hijo de puta.’

  Sergio laughed with his arms crossed, leaning back against the rails of the corral. ‘It is not the horse who has no memory. He catches you every time like that.’

  ‘He is one hell of a humorist, this horse,’ said Dionisio ruefully, inspecting his already swelling toes. ‘When I first had him he had no spirit at all, and now he is a trickster.’ He mounted the stallion and shook the long hair away from his face. Sergio smiled up at him, thinking that he looked the very image of an Indian in an old Western, with the police pistol stuck into his belt, and the long-tailed shirt that served as his raiment. But in comparison to Dionisio the horse was very richly adorned, because it still wore the accoutrements owned by its previous master, the coca cacique, Pablo Ecobandodo, who had caparisoned it in leather studded with silver and emeralds. On a sunny day Dionisio could be seen coming from a great distance on account of the glittering flashes from his saddle, and this was another of the reasons that he was regarded with a kind of superstitious awe even by those who knew him well.

  The jaguars followed behind the horse, swiping at its tail and dodging kicks, and Dionisio rode to the habitations of each of his women, calling upon Leticia Aragon the last. She was washing the first of Dionisio’s children to live, and she smiled and turned her face upward so that he could bend down from the saddle and plant a kiss on her cheek. She held up the child for him to kiss, and he patted her cheek and cradled her for a moment in his arms. This child was Anica Primera, because he had thirty-two children, all of which were designated by their order of arrival. The boys were all called Dionisito and bore upon their necks the hereditary scar of the knife and the rope, and the eighteen girls were all called Anica, according to his wish. What all of these children had in common were the strikingly blue eyes of Dionisio, also to be found upon his ancestor, the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, and upon his father, General Hernando Montes Sosa.

  It would have been quicker for him to walk, because he had acquired the Indian art of covering enormous distances over impossible terrain in very short periods of time. Aurelio and Pedro also shared this skill, and it was a terrible frustration for anyone to travel with them, finding themselves left behind by people who were apparently sauntering. Aurelio, of course, was capable of being in two places at once and knew the secret of flying off in the form of an eagle, leaving his body behind, empty-eyed and listless, and Dionisio too could give this impression by the speed of his ability to travel; but for some reason he felt today like taking the horse, and taking his time. Sometimes it is good to be ordinary.

  It took him three days of riding to reach Santa Maria Virgen. In the evenings he would build a fire and wait for the jaguars to bring him a vizcacha or a cui to roast over the flames, and then he would throw stones down the mountainside for the pleasure of watching the cats chase after them in a feline caricature of football. When it became cold he would retire to his bivouac amongst the rocks and take up his guitar. First of all he would play his ‘Requiem Angelico’ in memory of Ramón and Anica, and sometimes the curious acoustics of the mountains would carry this eerie tune to distant hamlets where the conversation would stop and people would cross themselves in the belief that this was a song of God borne to them by special dispensation upon the airwaves of the celestial ether. Afterwards the sound of sobbing would float into the night as grandmothers remembered their stillborn children and spouses who had not embraced for years reached out to each other for consolation in the face of beauty.

  Afterwards Dionisio would improvise more of his renowned musical palindromes which sounded the same forwards as they did backwards. He had begun to do this as a purely intellectual exercise, but had discovered that they possessed an hypnotic fascination caused by the puzzling reverberations of the suspicion of déjà vu in the mind of the listener. It was a feeling of the deepest and apparently groundless unease, which only disappeared when informed of the reason for it. With these Euterpean palindromes Dionisio felt that he was expressing all the anxiety of the age, and indeed he had made quite a sum of money out of them. They were enthusiastically transcribed by the Mexican musicologist who lived with Ena and Lena, and dispatched to Mexico City, from whence the musicologist’s agent distributed them throughout the world.

  When it became too cold for a musician’s fingers to co-operate, Dionisio would settle into his blanket and think about the past before he drifted off to sleep. His dreams would continue the theme of his thoughts, and he would be back in Ipasueño drinking wine with Ramón and making love with Anica. Somehow he would be both in the past and in the present, and Anica would tease him about having so many women these days, and he would say, ‘Bugsita, it takes that many to replace you,’ whereupon she would laugh and say, ‘But I am still here,’ and he would find himself confused and unable to answer. Once she came to him in a nightmare as she had been left when she was murdered, and he awoke choked with horror at her lidless eyes, her lipless mouth, the bleeding apertures where her nose and ears had been hacked away. Sorrowfully she had held out to him his first child who had died with her in her womb. He lived all over again the insanity and anger that had found only a small release when he had killed Pablo Ecobandodo in the plaza of the Barrio Jerarca.

  In the morning he would awake encumbered by the luxurious jaguars with their desire for warmth and their sweet smell of hay and strawberries, and he would have to wrestle with them to shift them off. He would break some bread for breakfast and contemplate the mist rolling along the valleys. Sometimes he would climb towards a cloud so that the level sun could shine behind him, cast his shadow upon the vapour, and create an
aureonimbus that decked him out as a saint. It would be a black shadow with an aura of rainbow lights that mimicked his every move and gave him intimations of a life to come, when he would live in Anica’s world.

  Generally he rode beneath the snowline for fear of chasms and out of respect for his horse. He would keep an eye out for avalanches and the onset of soroche, and sometimes he would squint against the sun in the hope of spotting condor vultures riding the updraughts of the thermals in their ceaseless quest for unmajestic carrion and ailing sheep. When he spotted an eagle he would wave in the suspicion that it might be Aurelio, and, when he was lower down where the marana begins, he would do the same when he saw a hawkhead parrot, in case it was the spirit of Lazaro.

  When he finally rode into Santa Maria Virgin it was midday, and he and the jaguars were covered in the fine white dust of travel. ‘Hola,’ he called to the old man and the old woman, and gestured with his hand in that lazy wave of peasants who wish to imply that all is right with the world and nothing is worth worrying about. They waved back, grinning through the gaps left by the absence of teeth, and he passed on to the house of the young girls who tended his car.

  He tethered the stallion to the doorpost, left it to chew contentedly at the straw thatch where it hung down from the roof, and ducked through the doorway. Momentarily sightless owing to the dark, he called, ‘Ines? Agapita?’ and a voice from the kitchen replied, ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Of course it is me. Who else would it be?’

  ‘That depends upon who me is. If it is not you, it might be someone else.’

  ‘It is Dionisio,’ he replied, ‘I am on my way to see my parents,’ and Agapita came in wiping her hands, with a shy smile upon her face. ‘I knew it was you all the time,’ she said. ‘I was just wasting time whilst I finished rolling a tortilla.’

  ‘You are growing so pretty that it breaks my heart,’ said Dionisio. ‘And how is Ines?’