The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  Aurelio stroked her cheek, and asked, ‘What is the other news?’

  ‘It is a message from the gods to the people of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. They say, “Build a wall, because we cannot help you.”’

  Aurelio was puzzled, ‘Which gods?’

  ‘It was Chango who told me on behalf of all the others.’

  ‘But he is Santa Barbara, he is a god of the black people. Why should he tell me?’

  ‘The gods are muddled up,’ she replied. ‘Chango says that there is a great evil in the land and that everyone is appealing for help to the saints and gods. He says that they will not answer both sides, because they would be divided against themselves, and therefore they will take no part. Chango says that he will not as a saint fight against himself as a god, and so he says to the people, “Build yourselves a wall,” and he says to the other people, “Do not pray to me, I will not answer you.” Pass the message on, Papacito.’

  ‘I will, Gwubba, and you must do something for me. Show yourself to your mother; she is full of sorrow that only I can talk to you.’

  Parlanchina tossed back her hair and smiled ruefully. ‘I have tried, but she cannot see me or hear me except when she dreams. You must teach her to dream when she is awake.’

  Aurelio sucked hard on his pestle and rubbed it against the neck of his poporro. ‘It is not for me to teach her anything. For me she is like Pachamama. It is she who teaches. Go and learn from her how she may see you, and I will find out where Federico is to be born, so that you may visit him.’

  She stood up and placed the ocelot upon the ground. It strolled away with its tail waving, and she began to follow it, but she turned and gave a small wave of her hand. ‘Thank you for the stories, and do not forget the wall, because there is blood on the face of the moon.’

  50 Sibila

  ‘THE GOLD OF the world is the rot of the soul,’ she said, and I woke up. I had been dreaming that I was in Ancient Greece. In the dream I was a rich and idle man, and I had a fine white robe. I was sitting on a hillside above the road, eating figs, when I saw a procession coming. It was a religious procession that was leading a bull to sacrifice at the altar stone, and everyone was singing and banging tambourines. I saw Sibila carrying the golden bowl, and immediately I took a fancy to her, the kind of fancy that can physically hurt. I think it was the childlike quality of innocence that was apparent in her odd way of being both clumsy and graceful at the same time. She was willowy and sinuous, she walked in an unconsciously beautiful manner, very straight in the back, and yet she had a permanent red mark on one side of her nose where she had walked into the edge of a door when her mind had been on something else. She was childlike in the way she made up words and sometimes muddled her sentences. If she could not remember a word exactly, she would use another that sounded a bit like it, smile as if begging one’s indulgence, and pause to make sure that she had been understood. She would wave one hand and enquire, ‘What was the word I should have used?’

  In the dream I followed the procession to the sacrifice, and I remember watching as they cut the throat of the bull and Sibila caught the blood in the golden bowl. I was hiding behind a large red rock because I knew that no one was supposed to be present but the initiates, and I crouched there just willing her to come in my direction. Eventually I saw her coming. It was dark by now, and it was easy to grab her arm and put one hand over her mouth. I was a base character in that dream, and I began to paw at her whilst she struggled. I think I was trying to rape her, but she resisted so much that I took a bag of gold from my belt and spilled it on the ground. I said, ‘Look what I will give you,’ but she looked at me contemptuously, said, ‘The gold of the world is the rot of the soul,’ broke my grip, and ran off. In my complacency I could not believe that any woman could resist a man of my position and wealth, and then I woke up, feeling ashamed.

  Do you believe in reincarnation? I never used to, but Sibila changed my mind, and now I think that the dream was about something that happened in a previous life. I think she never trusted me because she remembered by intuition that I was untrustworthy, and I think that she lived off raw fruit and vegetables because she was working off the guilt of all the sacrifices in Ancient Greece. I think it was my punishment to be given a crippled leg, so that I would be forced to be modest with women.

  Sibila was always very sweet about my crippled leg. She never walked too fast, she stopped when I was in pain, and she always kissed me on both cheeks when we met, but all the same I always knew that she could only love me as a friend. Perhaps she also thought me too old, but definitely I was not attractive to her. It caused me some sorrow, but I loved her so much that I often bored her by staying too long with her. I could drink litres of tisanes and smoke many cigars in her little house, and even when she was bored with me she would still offer me more to drink, or an empanada to eat. I used to sing to her sometimes, and she used to sing as well, in her breathy voice, so thin and lovable. She liked to tell absurd stories about animals, and the thing she understood least in the whole world was why people enjoyed going fishing. I loved her so much that I declared myself one day, but I was not offended or surprised when she explained her position. To prove that she could love me as a friend, she invited me to see a film, when most girls would have said, ‘I do not think we should see each other anymore.’ I loved her so much that I was very happy just to be near her sometimes. She helped me to forget that I was a cripple. I would look into her grey eyes and feel that between us there was a direct communion of souls; it was because she saw me so clearly that she knew that she should not be my lover. I could not be trusted, you see, and she knew it by instinct, but loved me as a friend all the same. She was very noble. I would lie awake at night imagining that I was making love to her, and believe me, I know exactly what it would have been like, which is almost as good as having actually done so. If you do not believe me, it is because you have never loved anyone in that manner yourself. I had observed her moving, watched the fall of her clothes about her body, so many times that I knew precisely how she would have looked naked. Maybe there had been an incarnation when we really were lovers, and I was remembering it.

  Sibila knew three languages, a very rare thing in Quintalinas de las Viñas, but there was always something about her that made her want to be somewhere else. She chose lovers with whom she knew that she would not remain, so that I felt safer in being merely a friend, and she loved to be left alone. When she was alone she would go to sleep or just do nothing at all. She felt guilty about not enjoying company very much and about looking forward to when visitors would leave. She once had a party and almost nobody came; this was because if you knew her well, you would love her utterly, but if you were only an acquaintance, then you did not feel like taking the trouble to respond to her invitations.

  She used to like to disappear sometimes. She went to look at ancient monuments, great standing stones with holes through them, or strange archways standing in the forest for no apparent purpose. Once I went with her and we got drunk and smoked some marijuana together. She laughed more than I had ever seen before, sitting on the ground waving a loaf of bread and singing.

  Once she went to Cochadebajo de los Gatos to look at the ancient Indian remains, and whilst she was there she heard Father Garcia preach. She had never been a good Catholic, and like me she never went to mass. I had a grudge against God for letting me be a cripple. When she came back she had a new light in her eyes, saying that she had seen Father Garcia levitate whilst he preached. She said that he had sorted out some intellectual problems for her by explaining that the world was created by the Devil, that we were all angels imprisoned in our bodies, and that to know this was the first step in reforming the world and finding our way back to our true nature. She told me that we could learn to pick up our fallen crowns and put on our robes of light. When she explained it to me her face lit up with a glow of beauty, and I fell in love with her even more. I was not sure if I believed in what she told me, but I loved her so much that
I definitely pretended to, just to remain close to her. You see, she started to spread this new gospel herself, and I followed her around acting as a kind of assistant. She did not go to village plazas and preach, as itinerant preachers do. She used to go somewhere and just hang around in public places, and somehow she would accumulate people to talk to. I think that she made people feel intrinsically beautiful by informing them that in reality they were angels. Even beggars felt more confident. Old ladies would smile so happily that you could tell what they had looked like when they were young. She could make violent drunks recognise that they were betraying themselves, and she also scared them by saying that they would be reborn as armadillos and coral snakes. ‘Behave like an angel, love like an angel, because you are an angel,’ she said. ‘Feel the ring of pressure about your head where once you wore a crown, and feel the silk against your skin that was your robe of light.’ She took to wearing a cord about her waist to signify that she was bound to her faith, and people began to call her ‘La Perfecta’.

  The more that she created an immaculate simplicity in her own life, the more I yearned for her. But I was not good enough. I could not live off raw fruit and vegetables, and sometimes I would slip away and eat a steak so big that it had to be served on a wooden board. But my leg became much stronger from walking everywhere with her, and now I do not limp very much. I suppose that is a kind of miracle.

  I do not want to give the impression that Sibila was a saint. She was not very austere, and she was like most women in that she could not walk past a stall that was selling sticky cakes. She liked to play games, and she did not disdain to join in conversations of a scandalous nature. She was also fond of cats. I think that most saints are probably either mad or obsessive or extremely disagreeable, but she was perfectly normal except that an inner light had switched itself on, deep inside her.

  Then one day the Dominican terror descended on Quintalinas de las Viñas. Hundreds of them appeared without warning, before dawn, and the town found itself wholly taken over. They set up an auto de fe in the church, but first of all they announced in the plaza that on Sunday everyone would have to go to the church for mass, in order to hear an edict. Like most people, I went out of curiosity, but not before the town had had to endure two days of appalling rowdyism and random violence from the bands of men who were travelling as bodyguards to the priests. Most people had to lock their doors, a thing hitherto unknown, and all the women stayed indoors.

  On Sunday the church was overflowing, and it seemed to me that our priest was looking very unhappy. He stumbled over the words of the mass, and he preached a sermon, very hesitantly, in which he talked about the trials of life, courage in the face of suffering, tolerance, and how we should emulate God in His mercy. We realised later that to preach this sermon must have taken great fortitude, but we all assumed at the time that his nervousness was due to having to preach in front of a Monsignor who was a legate.

  At the end of the sermon the Monsignor arose from his seat and took the crucifix from the altar. He asked us to cross ourselves, raise our right hands, and follow him in a vow to ‘support the Holy Office’. No one raised their hand, but then some of his bodyguard began to walk up and down the aisle, glaring at us in a threatening manner, and one or two timid souls raised their hands. The bodyguard began to take notes of who had not thus responded, and were demanding our names, so that very soon we were all intimidated into raising our hands. When we were thus made to appear like schoolchildren, the legate read out the oath for us to repeat, which we did with only half a heart and with a deal of mumbling.

  Then the legate read out what he called an ‘Edict of Grace’, which listed an immense number of heresies, most of which none of us had ever heard of. It included things like reciting the psalms without the Gloria Patri at the end, circumcision, turning to the wall when dying, putting clean sheets on the beds on Saturdays, being Nestorians or Bogomiles, killing animals by cutting their throats, and God knows what else. It took half an hour for the list to be read. At the end of it he said that we had two days to discharge our consciences by coming forward to denounce ourselves or anyone else whom we knew to be guilty. He said that all taking advantage of this would be reconciled to the Church without punishment. Old Patarino, who has always been fearless of authority and a joker, immediately stood up and declared that he had been circumcised when young because of a tight foreskin. Many people giggled, and one of the bodyguard struck him on the side of the head and dragged him out of the church. It seems that they threw him down the well and stoned him to death as an unrepentant Jew and Christ-slayer.

  In the face of this violence, many people stood up asking sincerely to repent, having divined correctly that it would be safer to denounce oneself than to have someone else do so out of a grudge or cowardice. There were some surprising confessions. One man said that he had taken soil from the grave of a bad priest to use in a spell, someone else said that he had a talisman made for him by an Indian brujo, and a woman said that she had prayed to Oshun for safer childbirth. The men of the bodyguard took their names, and the legate declared them reconciled. He then said that the following Tuesday there would be an Edict of Faith, inviting the denunciation of others, and that to effect this, everyone in the village would be questioned by him personally.

  This legate, referred to with no apparent sense of irony by his followers as ‘El Inocente’, was a human devil. And I mean that literally. He seemed to be made of wood, he was so dispassionate. He was like a vulture. He was thin as a corpse, and his face looked as though it had been badly sawn out of a log. It had flattened portions like those you see in illustrations of Pinocchio. His voice was drier than leaves, and he rode a huge black horse. He filled us all with fear, and I went straight to Sibila to tell her that we must leave the town before hell broke loose. I had an intuition of it, as though I had been through it before, and remembered.

  51 Parlanchina’s Lament

  I AM UNDONE by memory, I am not like a cat who loses her kittens and mourns for a day. When I was small there was a cat who had kittens, and one of the kittens I thought had too little milk, and I held it in a bowl of milk and it drowned, and I made a disaster out of my good intentions. And the mother cat, perhaps she did not even notice because she could not count, and perhaps she felt only a small emptiness and an absence at her dugs, but I wept with the desolation that she could not feel, and my guilt was terrible, and I asked Papa to punish me, and he stroked my hair and said, ‘No, Gwubba, you punish yourself,’ and I ate nothing but ants for a day, and I helped Mama with the cooking, which I hate, eating nothing of what I had cooked and eating only ants, and I begged the mother cat to forgive me, but she lay there with her kittens because every mother expects to lose a child. She looked at me with those big yellow eyes and I tore my hair because I had hurt her and she was hurting without any knowledge.

  And now the stars are shining for me by day, and unhappiness is like a pain made of machetes and thorns. The taste of life is like piquia oil in the mouth, and perhaps I would spit but the bitterness would remain, and perhaps after all everything is for nothing, and I cry in the night like an owl and laugh without humour like the laughing hawk, and my soul flies hither and thither in confusion, and all I am made of is memory.

  When I first saw you, my husband, sweet lover, my guardian, my dark fish swimming in the waters of my womb, you were handsome. You were like an old man, you were so serious, you were like a child, you were smooth and unmade. You were like a dolphin, strong and innocent, and how I loved you, lay awake at night for the thought of you, slept in the broad day for the sake of dreaming of you. I followed you in the forest and you never saw me, but in the not knowing of me you still loved me, and I was tempted. I tried to save you, but the jaguar killed you, and in death your soul rose up and the first sight of your dead eyes was me, and you said, ‘Ah, I dreamed of you, and your name is Parlanchina,’ and I took your hand, and at that time I was so young dead that I scarcely sprouted breasts, and nonetheless you lov
ed me. And you took me as I took you, and we grew love as Papa grows his maize in the clearing, and our love was like a quebracha, hard and strong, and we became invincible. And on the praias and savannas, amid our bones whitening in the tomb, in the stone chulpas of the sierra, running above the topmost trees of the montana, I fell upon your body and our hunger was unfed with devouring. I remember your eyes grew wild and your lips swelled, and the waves would start at my feet and head and meet in the middle, and my toes curled so that sometimes it hurt me even when I was adrift on delight’s canoe somewhere in the centre of a dark sun. ‘Federico, Federico, Federico,’ I said, and the name meant all things that I had ever meant, and, ‘Ay, ay, ay,’ I cried, and my happiness was such that I came out of the other side of happiness and began to weep, and you took my hair and wiped my tears with, ‘I love you Parlanchina, I love you. You are beautiful like Yemaya. For this, death was not so bad, and the jaguar did me a favour, thanks be to all cats, and all the gods bless them.’ And I was laughing as I cried, and I did not feel that I was dead, because this was life made better, like a knife that cuts sharper for the burning in Papa’s fire.

  And sometimes I would go up into the mountains and surprise you as you watched the paths, and sometimes you would come down into the jungle and catch me as I ran among the trees, and always we would mate like dolphins, twisting and rolling, calling and crying, and my breasts grew, and my belly swelled. I remember how you would run your hands and kneel before me naked, kissing my legs and the baby’s door, saying, ‘Come little child, your papa is calling,’ and I would squirm, saying, ‘Get away, get away,’ and all the time you knew I was saying, ‘Closer, I love you, come closer,’ and you laughed and held me tighter, and the pleasure could have killed me.

  And the daughter came in the night without my knowing, waking me up in my dreams, and there she was beside me before I had even woven a hammock for her, and she never cried, because she was born not to Parlanchina living but to Parlanchina dead, and Papa was happy, and you were her father, so proud to hold her that you scarcely gave me time to take her and feed her my body’s milk. And now she can stand for a second and makes noises that could be words, if only they could be understood, and before my eyes you are fading.