I find that I have descendants who refuse me my ring, and Señor Dionisio Vivo says, ‘Come, it is time to be educated in the modern world,’ and I say, ‘A thousand shits on your modern world,’ but he takes my arm and explains the principles of flight and the abominations of democracy, as though there had been no advance since ancient Greece. And afterwards I come home and I see Remedios, and my heart lifts as she kisses my beard and says, ‘Did you have a nice day at school?’ and I say with all humility, ‘Woman, remove your clothes,’ and she takes them off, and just as I have unbuckled all my accoutrements with prodigious haste and fumbling, she slips her clothes back upon her body and says, ‘Querido, it is time you learned romance,’ and I raise my voice and the very mountains tremble with my oaths, and she pats my cheek and says, ‘Querido, how sweet you are.’ A woman is the Devil’s work, by God.
15 Concepcion
CONCEPCION HAD COOKED fish in dende oil, and now she was braising it in a sauce of peppers, garlic and tomatoes. It was going to be so tender that the flesh would fall off the bones, first one side, and then the other. If she was very careful the fillets would not break up at all, and she would be able to turn them over with the spatula and pick out what was left of the bones with the tip of a knife. She would purse her lips with the concentration, perhaps everything would turn out right, and then she would pick out the tiny roundels of flesh in front of the gills and eat them herself, before throwing the head and fins out of the scullery door for the stray cats. The roundels were the most delicate and delicious bits, and they were the only thing that she ever withheld from the Cardinal.
She referred to him as her ‘cadenay’, which in Quechua means ‘my chain’, and although the Indians commonly refer to their spouses in this way, and nothing should be read into it, it was in her case particularly appropriate, for Concepcion was bound to him by every link of her being.
She had been only thirteen when she had been taken on in the kitchens and old Mama Cuchara had taught her the polite way to curtsey to the Cardinal and stand behind him when he ate, waiting for his requests, pretending not to notice when the peas scattered from his fork or a morsel of food fell onto the tablecloth. It was her job to knock discreetly upon his study door in the mornings and deliver him a silver pitcher of rich coffee and the bread rolls, and to run back there when he pulled the chord of the bell to ask for a jug of water or a piece of fruit. Sometimes he used to raise an eyebrow at her scurrying and bobbing, and would say, ‘Calm down, my child, it is not so important that you should wear out the palace with bustling,’ and she would smile and curtsy as she had been taught, and say, ‘No, Your Eminence.’
He was very handsome in those days in his ecclesiastical robes, with his greying hair and his black eyebrows, his fine European complexion and his eyes the colour of a lake on a cloudy day that always looked down at her from a height even when he was seated, and which seemed to be the filter of so much knowledge. When he patted her on the head or put his hand on her shoulder in a paternal way, it was as though for a moment a lacuna had been plugged. She had never known her own father, her mother had been crushed by a police van whilst lying drunk in the darkness of an alleyway, and that was how she had ended up with the Sisters Of Charity, who sent her to the palace to work in the kitchens. Because the Cardinal was her new father, she sometimes responded to his caring gestures in the way that a daughter would, and sometimes she allowed the physical space between them to disappear, such as when he showed her an interesting illustration in a book or together they smelled the perfume of a flower. Sometimes their faces touched, and he would feel the soft caress of her hair on his cheeks, catching the scent of a young girl somewhere amongst the odours of onions and polish. One day he stroked her cheek and said, ‘You are a very sweet child; how I envy you your purity and innocence,’ and with her blossoming intuition she had deduced from this that he was sad and lonely. Her heart was moved by his sorrow, and her belly stirred with the first intimations of love.
Concepcion calculated time by the passage of her menstruation. It was at the fortieth menstruation that Mama Cuchara died and left her in charge of the kitchens, and just after the sixtieth that she was in the room when His Eminence had his first attack. The Cardinal was standing by the window with his hand on the curtain chord when suddenly an expression of panic crossed his face, his breath whistled with a sharp intake, and both arms went to his stomach as he doubled over and panted. With one hand he groped for the table, and he fell into his chair with his mouth wide open and tears of pain in his eyes.
She was helpless and undecided for a moment, but then she ran to him and knelt down before him. He gasped again, and she instinctively circled him with her arms and hugged him, whispering as he rocked the words that she been used to hear from her own mother in those distant times when she had had someone to embrace: ‘Tranquilo, tranquilo.’
‘O, I have a terrible pain,’ he said, throwing back his head, ‘o, it is terrible. Concepcion, help me, for the love of God.’
She held him tightly, pressing the side of her head against his until the ratcheting breath eased and subsided. He relaxed and placed his hand on her arm in a kind of confidential gesture of appreciation, and at that point the fear of losing him and the love that had been growing in her belly combined in a conspiracy of fate, and she kissed him fully upon the lips.
When their mouths parted everything had changed. The whole basis of their relationship had been knocked aside as if by earthquake, and neither of them had any words to back away or to go forward. The Cardinal looked into her eyes and saw that the pupils were as large as moons. He saw that her young lips were moist and vulnerable, and he saw the dark little mulatta freckles upon her cheeks. It was a moment of decision, a point where he was forced to choose between the laws of nature as God made them, and the laws of the Church and a censorious world.
It was not as if he had been unaware of the covert machinations of the natural love that had been growing as imperceptibly as a tree. He had often found her slender young form materialising in his imagination as he sat at his desk pondering some administrative conundrum, or, God forgive him, when he was upon his knees praying for a sign that he would be delivered from his imperfection. More than once he had found himself speculating upon the impossibilities of this temptation; a girl one-fourth of his age, a mulatta, uneducated, probably barely a Catholic, and he vowed to chastity and a life of love directed not to this but to another world. This was no prostitute to be visited furtively and disguised, to be confessed obliquely and forgotten until the next time; this was Concepcion, who had placed her trust in him and was barely more than a child.
She took the choice away from him. She sat in his lap and hugged him with such fierce loyalty that his heart was unfathomably touched, and his hands that had been lying on his knees as though he had disowned them were suddenly raised to circle her. ‘I have never been loved before.’ he said, and immediately wondered why he had said it.
‘I, too, am an orphan,’ she murmured, and although he had not meant to imply this with what he had said, he did not deny it. He thought of his demented dead mother with her obscene collection of furs, and his father, perpetually absent, speculating in government bonds and buying one car after another, using his position to climb the ladder of the oligarchy that was also a plutocracy. ‘Well, then, we are both orphans,’ and he laughed softly, thinking that even God had been an absent father, impossible to please.
Knowing his bitterness and solitude without knowing them by those words, she continued to embrace him, and with a forefinger she caressed his ear and played with the hair of his temple. ‘We should not be doing this,’ he said.
‘Tchaa,’ she went, in the immemorial peasant manner, and with this one interjection dismissed centuries of clerical tradition and all the edifice of casuistry which keeps cold the beds of those who elect to follow heaven. The Cardinal was so taken by the force of her argument that he laughed again, abruptly becoming nothing more than a man in love with a woma
n. He returned her kiss.
In bed with the young Concepcion, moving together limb to limb, adrift upon some ocean where there is no more self and no more earth, where darkness and light are one and the same thing, where consciousness explodes at once violently and with tranquillity, Cardinal Guzman knew at last the gentle bliss of Eden. In the twilight aftermath of their love, hovering between sleep and death, he dreamed of nakedness in cool places. He dreamed that the sun became the moon, that God walked the earth in the guise of an angel, that there was a place where jaguars slept with fauns between their paws, that he and Concepcion lived alone in a world of fruit and birds, that somewhere one could awake in the dew and run without any purpose other than to rejoice in the body’s ecstasy.
Sometimes he had been cruel to her during their time together; there had been the terrible fear of discovery that had led him to be curt and imperious with her when there was anyone else present, and there had been the crises of conscience that had caused him to strike her and call her ‘the tool of the Devil’ or ‘Satan’s paw’, as though he could force her to usurp the place of Eve as the source of blame. There had been the time when, after a night of prayer prostrate before the altar, he had summoned her and dismissed her without explanation or compassion, so that she had fled away in tears and he had had to repent and send a messenger after her to bring her back.
But when the child arrived and became the scandal of the palace, he realised that the whole hierarchy of the Church knew of his affair and had kept silent for fear of his authority. He knew it by the way that people looked at him, by the conspiratorial manner in which they smirked when Concepcion entered the room bearing refreshments, and by the fashion that their expressions betrayed contempt whenever he took a moral stand upon an issue. He began to rely upon his office rather than his humanity in order to get things done.
The child was a secret delight to him that he could never own. When he placed his hands upon its head and called it ‘my son’, it was a pleasure to him that he could mean it other than figuratively, and he would dandle it upon his knee and allow it to tug at his crucifix with chocolate-plastered fingers. He would not object when a great string of saliva descended onto his robes, or when the child suddenly eructated vomit as children do. Concepcion said that when he was born, Cristobal was born laughing; thereafter he provided his father with happiness to outweigh his guilt and his anxiety, allowing him to experience another variety of affection that otherwise would have been denied him.
The couple settled into a relationship that was very like a marriage, except that it was unavowed and furtive. It survived through the years with its gentle routine of nocturnal assignations and meaningful glances, and it even survived the Cardinal’s ever more frequent demonic visitations. When the devils arrived it would be Concepcion who would take him by the shoulders and steady him until the terror had abated, who would soothe him with motherly noises and bring him his crucifix to hold.
It was also she who dealt with his attacks of abdominal pain. The second one occurred a year after the first, and therafter they happened at least once every three months. She never understood (because he never told her) that the reason for his never consulting a doctor was that he felt, with a strange logic, that they were a punishment sufficient to cleanse him of his sins so that they were washed away. In this way they never accumulated so much that he felt he had to give up Concepcion in order to expunge them altogether.
So it was that she was making him fish cooked in dende oil so many years later, secure in the knowledge that she was with him for life. In any case, what would there be for her if she left? Prostitution and beggary? What would there be for young Cristobal? A job in the chrysanthemum-houses where one got skin diseases and died of tumours? A job polishing shoes in the streets and a dwelling place in the sewers? No, she was happy making fish in dende oil, and she would take it up to him so that he could eat it before Monsignor Rechin Anquilar arrived, and maybe it would do his stomach some good.
16 In Which His Excellency President Veracruz Wins The General Election Without Rigging It Very Much (1)
‘WELL, GENTLEMEN, MY term of office is rapidly drawing to a close, and it is no longer possible to temporise. Allow me to remind you of what you already know, which is that your jobs as well as mine are at stake, so let us have no fuel for rumours about cabinet splits and longshots for my office, OK?’
‘Boss, this is not a good time for an election. The effects of the Los Puercos victory vote cannot be duplicated this time, because we have had no such further victories on account of having had no wars. We have no one against whom to declare a war at the moment, the situation is very bad.’ This was Emperador Ignacio Coriolano speaking his mind at the meeting of the cabinet in the Presidential Palace.
‘Emperador, how many times do I have to ask you not to call me “boss”? We are not in Panama now. Can’t we declare war on East Germany? I am sure that would increase our grants from the United States, and the physical dangers would be very small.’
The members of the cabinet exchanged resigned glances; ‘Your Excellency, may I remind you that East and West Germany are nowadays one country?’ It was the Minister for Foreign Affairs, a huge, suave man in a velvet smoking-jacket, who had been humorously appointed to that office because his wife was Norwegian and his mistress was French.
His Excellency appeared to be disconcerted by this news. Wearily he passed his hand over his brow. ‘Truly,’ he said, ‘one is so busy these days that one’s job prevents one from keeping up with events. This must be the reason why the East German Ambassador no longer comes to official functions and has ceased to send me gifts of inedible sausages.’
‘Why do we not just have the ballot boxes filled in advance, as we did last time?’ asked Emperador, who for notorious reasons always smelled of anchovies.
‘There was a scandal last time, when the number of voters turned out to be three times the number of the population,’ replied His Excellency, ‘and in any case, I seem to detect that times are changing. I mean, these days one has to do it right. One cannot occupy the moral high ground against the coca people, and then go and lose it because of corruption scandals.’
‘What we need is a few coups,’ observed the Minister for Foreign Affairs. His Excellency appeared extremely shocked, and the Minister hastily added, ‘I mean, Your Excellency, that undemocratic coups always increase the popularity of democratic governments. Is there no young colonel who could stage an abortive foco in return for a little something?’
‘We’ve shot ourselves in the foot here,’ interjected the Minister for Internal Affairs. ‘Ever since we appointed General Hernando Montes Sosa to be chief of the General Staff it has become impossible to do things of this kind. He has established absolute discipline in the Armed Services and thrown out all the troublemakers. No one will do anything without his permission, and he won’t do anything without ours.’
‘Damn,’ exclaimed the President, who had appointed the man for precisely the reasons that were now proving an obstacle. ‘Maybe we can try the Communists.’
‘There would be more chance with a Conservative,’ said Emperador. ‘There are fourteen Communist parties of different complexions now, and it is damned hard to find one of the old Stalinist school. They have all turned into soggy Liberals.’
‘We are the Liberals,’ said His Excellency stiffly.
‘No one is suggesting that we are soggy, though,’ said Emperador hastily. ‘I suggest that we ask the Minister of the Interior to find a Conservative to do it.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said the aforementioned minister, who was the token female in the political set-up, and had resolved to keep her place by being even more devious, mendacious, brown-nosed and calculating than the men. The people used to refer to her as ‘Eva Perón’ on account of her dubious antecedents and her penchant for populist escapades. She was to be seen almost daily in the newspapers, kissing stray dogs, weeping eloquently at the scenes of mining disasters, or shaking a proferred stump
of the non-contagious variety of leper. ‘But,’ said Eva, ‘why not simply pretend that there has been a coup attempt? It would be cheap, simple, non-dangerous. All one has to do is release a statement to the press, and then His Excellency can go on television and say something sobering about it, and then I can go on television saying how he heroically saved us by tackling the armed man in person, and then Emperador can go on television and say that it was the Conservatives. Then we can look at the polls, and if our popularity is high we can start the election immediately, but if it is not high enough we can declare a state of emergency so that we can delay a little . . .’
‘Señora, if I may interrupt, I agree entirely with this notable plan, but I propose that we declare a state of emergency in any case, but still go ahead with the elections on the grounds that we cannot countenance even an emergency interfering with the due processes of democracy. I think that would impress the electorate most favourably.’
‘Very good, Emperador,’ said His Excellency, ‘our slogan will be “Democracy is Safe in Our Hands”.’
As it was decided, so it happened. The Ambassador in the United States went to a joke and novelty shop to purchase a packet of realistic adhesive bullet-holes such as one finds on the windscreens of the cars of the young men of that country, and sent them home in the diplomatic bag. His Excellency personally stuck them onto the presidential limousine, and appeared on television looking both calm and dignified. Eva Perón appeared on the news and, her eyes shining with admiration, explained how His Excellency had thwarted the gunman by wrestling the weapon from his grasp, whereupon the would-be assassin had taken to his heels. Emperador Ignacio Coriolano appeared on television to announce that in his opinion it was part of a Conservative anti-democractic conspiracy to eliminate the principal electoral asset of the Liberal Party. His Excellency announced a state of emergency and simultaneously proclaimed the election for the twelfth of June.