The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán

by Louis de Bernières

  They all looked with astonishment at the slow smile that was spreading across the grey face of the immobile ghost that had become as much a fixture of the whorehouse as the empty bottles and the spittle on the floor.

  Remedios raised her hand to speak. ‘Let us say that we adopt this plan, for the sake of argument. Nearly all of the women have children to attend to, so they should stay and defend the city. Most of the children are Dionisio’s, so therefore he too should stay. The leader of Dionisio’s women is Fulgencia Astiz, and she should stay here to lead them. I should go with the men because if I stay here I will argue with Fulgencia, and because I will prevent the men from doing anything stupid on the way. Also the Spanish soldiers brought back from the dead by Aurelio should stay here, because their long death has made most of them too stupid to do anything for very long, and the Conde should stay here to lead them, as is his right. When they hear gunfire, and see through the General’s binoculars that we are attacking the English from behind, they should issue out of the city and also attack.’

  ‘No one can withstand a campaign on two fronts,’ said the General. ‘Look at the examples of Napoleon and Hitler.’

  ‘Bolivar could have done it,’ said Profesor Luis.

  ‘Do you see Bolivar out there with the English?’ asked the General rhetorically, sweeping his hand in a dismissive gesture.

  ‘This marvellous plan is all very well,’ observed Pedro, sipping his aguardiente, ‘but where the hell has Aurelio been all this time?’

  63 Strategic Manoeuvres And A Pleasant Surprise

  ‘IF YOU WISH to attack them from the south,’ said Aurelio, ‘then you would have to go back down into the jungle, where you would be bitten and stung, the way would be slow, and the weight of your packs would dissolve you in sweat and curses. Then you would have to go to the high place from where we once watched the flood pouring out over the plain. From there you would follow the same way as our first journey to this place.’

  ‘Through the paramo?’ asked Misael, shuddering at the thought, and Aurelio nodded affirmatively.

  Misael put his hands protectively over his nether region. ‘Let them not be frozen away,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘They will not have to be,’ replied Aurelio. ‘If you choose to approach from the north, you can merely go down to the plateau, go north to where the next valley comes down, and go up it. The slope is long and gentle. Near the top you may turn south up another valley that has a great torrent in it. It is another long but more difficult climb. Then at the end you may come over the ridge, and you will be over there.’ He pointed to the right-hand end of the valley. ‘I will come with you and show you the way.’

  Aurelio had turned up inconspicuously, and had been found by Dionisio in the plaza, contentedly pounding the pestle in his gourd of coca leaves and lime. He had looked very surprised when reproached for his absence at a time of emergency, replying, ‘I was harvesting chicle and smoking my rubber. I only came back to be here when Leticia Aragon gives birth to Parlanchina. I have left Carmen alone in the jungle when I should be planting maize.’

  So it was that the men and Remedios gathered all the supplies that they would require for a short and victorious expedition. Profesor Luis’ grand apparatus worked at night to lower down fifty mules, assorted armaments with ammunition, and the men themselves, leaving only the women, the Spanish conquistadors, and Dionisio Vivo. They leaned over the precipice to watch the expedition wending its way along the lush plateau below. ‘Thanks be to God that the men have gone. We will have peace at last,’ said Consuelo, wiping a sentimental tear from her eye at the thought of all that virility going into battle. Doña Constanza waved vigorously at a tiny figure that she thought was Gonzago, and Gloria waved at a similarly minuscule one that she believed to be Tomás. Fulgencia Astiz shrugged her sturdy shoulders, and went up to the wall in the hope of finding someone in her sights that she could shoot. Her Santandereana soul was bristling with the pugnacious morbidity of her people, and as she lay down and adjusted her sights, she sighed with the satisfaction of true happiness. Her two children by Dionisio she sat beside her, so that they might learn at a precocious age the true intoxication and significance of death. The Spanish soldiers sat in the plaza, being harangued by the Conde in the name of the King of Spain, their vacant minds wandering away to distant campaigns, and becoming lost somewhere during the time of the foundation of the city of Ipasueño.

  Down on the plateau the men already missed the practical and temperate climate of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, but were thankful that they did not have to descend into the jungle. They filled their mochilas with avocados, mangos, and papaya, and slaughtered two steers. The still-quivering flesh was cut into pieces that were wrapped in the leaves of palm, and handed out to each one as his ration for the expedition. Those who believed in such things drank the steaming blood from gourds, hoping thereby to acquire strength. Pedro poured blood over his own head and fixed white feathers in it as it dried in the sun, becoming inwardly, by this outward sign, quintessentially a warrior.

  Through the verdant banana groves and orchards of guava they picked their way, past the irrigation canals that swarmed with fish and the larvae of mosquitoes, skirting the stewponds and rice fields, with their high banks and floodgates. Everywhere they saw as if for the first time the triumph of their own persistence and labour over the chaotic and disintegrating forces of nature, and everything that they saw strengthened their resolve to defend it even at the price of their own lives.

  By evening they were half way up the first of the long valleys, and were already experiencing the milder air of a less exuberant clime. They pitched camp on a raised and level spot, remembering from the past that to encamp at the bottom of a valley is to ask for a soaking in the event of rain. The rocks were stained red from iron, and high up on the valley walls were the abandoned mineshafts of the gold-loving Incas and the conquering Spanish. Below them stretched a prospect of palms, and above them there lay fallen rocks and spiny succulents unknown to botanical science, whose pink flowers seemed to be attended, every one, by quarrelsome hummingbirds defending their own tiny domain. They slept the night accompanied by the music of falling streams, the ache of their thighs obliterating the discomfort of stony beds.

  The next day found them winding up the valley of torrential water. A thin mist of spume hung in the air, and in this place the hard hoofs of their mules slipped upon the watery rocks that glistened with the ears of fungus and yellow lichen, the film of green algae, and the absolute blackness of basalt. They followed an ancient path worn by feet that had not trodden those parts since before the time of Manco Capac, and they looked down upon the thunderous white flood, terrified by the mere fact of being able to understand why it was that one of the mules, stupefied and hypnotised, had leapt unprovoked into the abyss. They released their fear by whipping along the mules, with cries of ‘Burro, burro,’ that were lost in the rumble of water, and shouted with relief when it was time to turn and mount the ridge that would poise them for an attack upon the intruders who had despoiled their own valley and broken their abiding peace.

  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.

  64 The Epiphany Of The False Priest

  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. Afterward
s 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.’