Don Emmanuel looked at him balefully and asked, ‘Do you have a dog?’
‘Si, señor,’ replied the pilot.
‘Well,’ said Don Emanuel, ‘your dog’s your mother.’
There was a stunned silence, and then all of us except for Aurelio, who has a great respect for dogs, burst out laughing. The big pilot carried on digging for a few moments, and then he straightened up and said, ‘The next person to laugh finds their own way home,’ and we all fell silent on the instant. But Don Emmanuel would not desist. ‘Your mother is so much of a man that she is really your father,’ he said, and then he added, ‘And you wear a moustache in order to be reminded of her.’
The pilot said nothing, but when we had the tractor hooked up to the helicopter by cables and were embarking, the pilot blocked Don Emmanuel’s way and held out a helmet rather like that of a motor-cylist, and a thick quilted suit. ‘We wear these for the extreme cold of high altitude,’ he said.
Don Emmanuel looked puzzled.
‘You are not coming on my aircraft,’ said the pilot. ‘Put these on and ride the tractor.’
Now, we could see that Don Emmanuel was about to protest, but the big pilot went up close and glared down at him, holding out the suit. He added, ‘Or walk.’
Meek as an alpaca, Don Emmanuel put on the flying gear and clambered onto the seat of the tractor. He sat there clinging to the cables all the way home, whilst the pilot flew as close to the ground as it is possible to imagine. I am prepared to bet that Don Emmanuel was not only petrified but was positively congelated with cold once we got into the sierra. We were looking out of the doors, watching him frantically warding off the buzzards and alcamarini birds that hurtled towards him, and all of us swore afterwards that it was the best thing we had ever seen.
When we returned it was too late to go back to fetch Antoine’s tractor, and so we decided to fetch it on the day following. But when we assembled at dawn, who should come along but Remedios, Consuelo and Dolores, all armed to the teeth, and Misael said, ‘Madre de Dios, they have come to take revenge upon the Army.’
But it was not so, for Remedios said, ‘You men get out of here, it is the women’s turn to ride the helicopter today,’ and Sergio started to protest, saying things like, ‘Ay, ay, this is man’s work, you pretty things go back to your pots,’ and that was the worst remark he could say. Dolores swung at the side of his head with her mochila, and it cracked against his ear like a pistol shot. Dolores keeps her mochila filled with Brazil nuts in order to threaten any man who refuses her advances, but for once a ride in the helicopter was of more importance to her than one hundred pesos for a good lay.
So we men backed off, and the women brought Antoine’s tractor back in good time even though Consuelo spread the story later that Dolores had enjoyed all four of the soldiers plus the pilot during breaks in their labours, and the latter spread stories about Consuelo being envious. They had a fight afterwards during the fiesta that was held to give thanks to the serviceman, interrupting the speech that Remedios was making in which she was declaring peace unilaterally on the Army and announcing the formal disbanding of the People’s Vanguard. After the fight was over Remedios said that in future the Army could help as often as they liked, as long as they were from the units commanded by General Hernando Montes Sosa. Indeed, later on they arrived with a helicopter bearing ten drums of fuel for the tractors, and three mechanical engineers to dismantle them and put them into service.
As for Don Emmanuel, he made peace with the pilot at the fiesta, but just as the latter was leaving he said, with a big white smile on his black face, ‘As for you, you son of a bitch, your grandmother bore you by your brother.’ He was shaking Don Emmanuel’s hand so hard, and gripping it so tight, that all that Don Emmanuel could think to reply was, ‘Just so, cabrón, you are exactly right.’
13 In Which His Eminence Makes A Fateful Choice
HIS EMINENCE CARDINAL Dominic Trujillo Guzman put the report of the Holy Office down upon his desk, uncharacteristically muttered an obscenity, and immediately crossed himself and cast his eyes heavenward, that it might be forgiven him.
He went to the window and gazed out over the city, which was sinking picturesquely into its usual short but spectacular sunset, and an vile stench invaded his nostrils, completely obliterating the momentary peace that had followed his anger. He leant out of the window and saw a dead hog floating along the river below, adorned with a king vulture that was busily engaged in trying to puncture its bloated raft. When the hog and its passenger had passed by, he noticed that there was a new smell, and that a couple were fornicating behind a bush. He saw that opposite there was the normal small knot of pious widows dressed in black, who always waited there in the evenings so that he could bless them when he appeared at the window. He raised his hand in greeting, remembering just in time to transform the casual gesture into a blessing. The women crossed themselves and rattled off at high speed a decade of the rosary before disappearing into the gathering darkness. His Eminence sniffed the air and identified the new smell.
‘Don Susto,’ he called, ‘in here please,’ and his secretary appeared. Don Susto was a small Franciscan with a perpetual sniffle, and grime beneath his toenails on account of his tenacious determination always to wear sandals. He took his vocation very seriously, and it was a torment to him to have been hauled away from his monastery in order to serve at the palace under a master whose failings were all too apparent to him. Being at an age of sixty years, worn out by a lifetime of prayer on stone floors, meagre diet, and getting up at five o’clock in the morning even when this was unnecessary, Don Susto had aged prematurely. He was shrunken and stooped, few shreds of hair sprouted forlornly from his scalp, and he was cadaverously thin. Of all his many virtues the one most valued by His Eminence was his conscientiousness, and his one solitary vice was smoking a pipe in secret with the windows of his cell wide open. He had lived forty years in the terror of being discovered by his superiors, and never confessed the sin directly until upon his bed of death. He was to die in puzzlement, having been informed by his confessor that smoking a pipe was not even a venial sin.
The faithful secretary shuffled in with a ledger beneath his arm, and His Eminence summoned him to the window. ‘Identify this smell,’ said the Cardinal, ‘and tell me if it is what I think it is.’
Don Susto leaned over the sill and sampled the rank odour. ‘I believe it is urine,’ he said, ‘it is unfortunately a sign of the times.’
‘What times?’ demanded the Cardinal. ‘Is there ever a time when the river past the palace should should be so malodorous?’
‘It is because of los olvidados,’ said Don Susto. The Cardinal sniffed haughtily, suspecting that he was about to receive a lecture upon a social issue, and asked, ‘And who are the forgotten ones?’
Don Susto tried to stifle his surprise at being asked such a question, and replied, ‘They are the very poor, Your Eminence. They have set up a favela outside of town, and it is very squalid. It breaks one’s heart to see them. They have no sewers, and so they go in the river even though they also draw their water from it.’
The Cardinal screwed up his face in disgust. ‘They should be removed. No doubt it is a nest of thieves and prostitution.’
‘But where to?’ asked Don Susto. ‘They have overflowed the classical ruins in the Incarama Park, and when they were removed they simply found their way back again. They are truly the lost souls of our time, and yet they are courageous, Your Eminence.’
‘How so, Don Susto? They are the feckless and the indolent, nothing more.’
‘It is true that they are uneducated and their morals are frequently deplorable, Your Eminence, but they are masters of improvisation. Every time it rains their cardboard shacks are washed away, and twenty-four hours later they are all built again. They make delicate stews from rats and sandal-leather, they live by swarming over the garbage tips raking them over for scraps, and in this way they are akin to Lazarus, Your Eminence. They suffer ty
phoid and cholera, and yet they hold the best carnivals in the capital.’
‘The carnivals are a pagan abomination, Don Susto.’ There was a long silence as the latter held in his feelings on the subject, and then the Cardinal asked, ‘Why are they here?’
‘Some are fleeing the anarchy of the cocaine regions, some are victims of agricultural mechanisation and underemployment, some are the victims of the reorganisation of the latifundos, some are fleeing the law in other regions, and some are hoping to make it rich in the big city. Most of them are cholos and don’t even speak Castilian. I have been meaning to suggest to you, Your Eminence, that here is an opportunity to set up missions upon our own doorstep.’
His Eminence sniffed. ‘We should get them moved back where they belong, to the care of their own priests. But there is something more urgent that I need to clarify with you.’ He went to the desk and picked up the report of the Holy Office. ‘Which incompetent atheists compiled this travesty of a report? And which incompetent nincompoop chose them for the task?’
Don Susto was taken aback by the anger in the Cardinal’s voice, and perplexed by his vehemence. ‘It was the Bishops of Cucuta, Asuncion, and La Igualdad, three most eminent men, Your Eminence.’
‘What? Those crypto-Communists? Those sloppy Liberals? Who appointed them, in the name of the Virgin?’
Don Susto thought carefully about the most tactful way of admitting that he had chosen them himself. ‘I consulted with Rome about who were the most eminent theologians in the country,’ he said at last, ‘and those were the names that they sent me. I did it in good faith, Your Eminence.’
The Cardinal was stunned momentarily into silence. He placed the sheaf of paper that he had been waving back onto the table, and returned to the window, only to retreat once more on account of the rancidity of the air. He raised his arms and let them fall to his side in a gesture of resigned despair. ‘It is enough to make one into a Protestant,’ he said. ‘I ask for a report on the spiritual state of the nation, and what I get back is a sustained attack on the Church itself, and, by implication, against my administration. Have you read it?’
‘Indeed, Your Eminence.’
‘And what is your opinion?’
Don Susto sensed danger and chose his words carefully. ‘It is certainly critical of the Church, Your Eminence.’
‘And do you agree with those criticisms?’
The secretary hedged. ‘I am not qualified to express an opinion, I have insufficient experience of our work in the field. But I do agree that there must be a connection between the spiritual state of the nation and the spiritual state of the Church. It strikes me as evident.’
The Cardinal picked up the report again and flicked through its pages, picking upon the portions that particularly irked him. ‘It implies that we are seven hundred years behind the European Church, trading in relics, selling absolutions; it states that there are high officials who have mistresses - have you ever heard such a thing? Do you know of a single case of this?’ He paused for rhetorical effect, and could not fail to notice that Don Susto was so wide-eyed at his hypocrisy that his mouth was actually hanging open. The Cardinal felt the flush of shame rising to his ears, and he turned away and walked once more to the window, affecting an indignant impatience. ‘In the second part,’ he continued, ‘a connection is implied between my term of office and the general decline. It rambles on about social conditions, knowing full well that we have no remit to interfere with matters of politics, and it accuses us of accepting tainted money from criminals. It even goes so far as to attack the upper classes, who are the very bastion of the church . . .’
Don Susto could not restrain himself. ‘The bastion of the Church is the Gospel,’ he said, and the Cardinal glared at him icily before continuing, ‘And the third part blames the proliferation of superstition upon the Church, accusing us of the misappropriation of funds for material purposes, as if we could survive without investment. It is an outrage, Don Susto, an outrage.’ He looked down from his superior height at the secretary, demanding with his glance the anticipated nods of agreement.
Don Susto was not a courageous man, but neither was he a man without principle. He did not nod. He stood very still, and then said softly, ‘Your Eminence, I beg your permission to return to my monastery.’
‘You agree with this report, don’t you, Don Susto?’
Don Susto said nothing for a moment; he was saddened by how far his life had wandered from his original quest for peace and contemplation. He had not been a monk so long in order to end up in a palace arguing with a cardinal who was a business-manager in scarlet robes. ‘Do I have your permission?’ he asked, evading the question.
The Cardinal was weary; he placed the report back on the desk once more, sighed, and said, ‘As you wish.’
The old secretary leaned forward to kiss the Cardinal’s ring, and then knelt to take his benediction. He stood up, and before leaving he asked, ‘Your Eminence, may I say something of a personal nature?’ And the Cardinal nodded his assent.
‘Your Eminence, it would ease my mind very greatly if you would consult with a doctor about the pains in your stomach. The days of hairshirts and flagellation are over, and the bodily pain merely increases your spiritual affliction.’
The two looked at one another as man to man for the first time, the panoply of office torn away. His Eminence extended his hand, and the secretary shook it. When Don Susto had gone, the Cardinal felt a choke of loneliness and unworthiness gather in his throat, and he too reflected upon how far his own life had deviated from the ideal of his youth.
Don Susto did not return to his monastery for ten years. Instead he wandered away on foot to lead the life of a mendicant and to reduce himself to a perfect point of simplicity. On his way he discovered a young faun trembling in a brake, abandoned, and he adopted it. It grew stately and graceful, following him wherever he went, and, inspired by the story of St Hubert, he hung a crucifix between its antlers. With the aid of this animal he made many conversions amongst the people of the sierra. Whilst with the Quechuas he discovered that in their language his name meant ‘sickness’, and so he changed it to ‘Salud’. This is why in some places one can find to this day little shrines decorated with silver tinsel, in which there are crude statuettes of a horned monk smoking a pipe, referred to by his devotees as ‘San Salud’. There used to be many more such shrines, but they were torn down by missionaries who took them to be pagan.
After Don Susto’s departure His Eminence, pondering his secretary’s advice to consult a doctor, felt the appalling pain overwhelming him once more. Instinctively he went to the window to take deep breaths of the evening air, and instead inhaled the dank putrefying stench of sewage. Violently he vomited out over the walls of the palace, and, doubled over, he sank to his knees. Sobbing with pain he prayed to the patron saint of sailors, St Erasmus, who was martyred by having his entrails wound out of his body upon a windlass. When the pain passed, and he was still breathless with its aftermath, he prayed also to St Job, patron saint of syphilitics. He knew that soon the reckless itch to visit a brothel would again overwhelm him, and he had a terror of passing infection to his mistress, Concepcion.
He sat for a little while, the report of the Holy Office in his lap, and decided to begin the next phase of his campaign. He decided that the leader of his crusade of preaching would be Don Rechin Anquilar, a man of absolutely cold intellectual certainty.
14 The Monologue Of The Conde Pompeyo Xavier De Estremedura Walking In The Sierra
A WOMAN IS the Devil’s work, by God. How she angers me, and I, a man of noble birth. Never before has a woman got the better of me and made me suffer such indignity. There is a misalignment of the heavens that nature should be so upset and the natural order skewed. I say to her, ‘My breakfast, woman,’ and audaciously she replies, ‘Get it yourself,’ or she meekly makes it and then she pours it in my helmet and says, ‘Eat, pig, from your trough.’ Or I say, ‘Come to me tonight, I wish to enjoy you,’ and s
he says, ‘I am tired,’ or, ‘Go to the whorehouse,’ and then she comes to me, by God, and she wishes to mount me and make me play the woman’s part, and she tells me, ‘Do not just lie there, move it in me,’ and I am reminded that when I mount her she will not stay still, but she moves her hips and moans, enjoying it most indecently, and all my intention is lost and I let loose cannonades before the walls are breached and the keep mined. And then she reproves me and I am ashamed like a boy who has fallen from a horse. I am so unmanned that betimes I reach for my sword and I say, ‘I will slit your nose as I did with the moor in Cordoba,’ and she laughs in my face and turns aside the blade and kisses me so that I am like a puppy who rolls over.
Remedios. She is a woman fit for kings, a woman to raise warriors of either sex. I can see her even with my eyes closed as I sit upon this rock so far from Estremedura. I will play a sport with myself and ponder what she is doing, and when I return I will ask her, ‘Remedios, what were you doing whilst I was away?’ She is dressed in green pantaloons, but that is not difficult, since she is dressed always as a man and a warrior to boot. She is cleaning her weapon, she has it in pieces on the table, and she furrows her brow and her eyebrows almost meet in the middle, and she is saying, ‘Tchhh,’ because there is a mote of dust in the barrel, and if I look down the barrel my gaze meets her fine brown eye, and with my other eye I see that she is smiling at me and she has all her teeth, most exceedingly white and fine. She ties her hair behind her head, very black and straight, and I say, ‘Woman, you have a horse’s rump upon your head, I will have it cut off and we will wind it into bowstrings or stuff cushions,’ and she replies most boldly and without hesitation, ‘Querido, I will geld you with it.’ It is fine strong hair.
How upside-down is the world! I am the least of men when before I was life and death, ordering the execution of emperors and founding fair cities bulging with slaves, using gold toothpicks and having my cuirass burnished by women using donkey-piss and their own hair. And afterwards I would give the prettiest a good lancing. Those were the days. Now I owe my life to an Indian. The dishonour of it, to be lifted from death’s embrace by the black arts, I, a Catholic servant of His Catholic Majesty. To be jerked from heaven to a world where women rule and even children read, their noses crammed in books like priests. It is a sacrilege, and now my armour rusts and when I kick a dog, it bites me.