His Eminence took this as it was intended, as a slight, since Anquilar had drawn attention to the distinction between a man and the office he holds. He stood up stiffly and extended his hand. Anquilar’s felt bloodless, and he did not shake it for long. ‘Dominus tecum,’ he said.
Anquilar returned his gaze as if through smoked glass. ‘Et cum spiritu tuo,’ he responded, and the Cardinal watched him go with a sensation of apprehension in his soul. After putting his great design into motion he felt strangely empty. ‘Kyrie, eleison,’ he muttered, and put his hands to his stomach. Either he was putting on weight, or his affliction was making his belly swell.
20 The Battle Of Doña Barbara
IN COCHADEBAJO DE los Gatos these was a plague of reading more insidious even than the great plague of laughing, the whimsical plague of cats, or the swinish plague of peccaries.
You could either borrow a book from Dionisio’s by leaving a deposit for surety, or you could buy one outright. To this end he published a table of equivalents, setting out the price of books in the following form: 1 book = 10 mangoes = half a chicken or duck = 1 guinea pig = 20 apples = 4 pepino melons or 2 large ones = 6 grenadillos = 1 steak of llama, vicuña, sheep, pig or cow = 6 papaya (not too ripe) = 2 packs of large native cigars = 1 worn out machete ground down to make a knife = 8 roots of cassava = 3 kilos of potatoes or 2 kilos of sweet potatoes = the loan of a mule for two days = 2 decent-sized edible fish without too many bones = 3 bunches of eating bananas or 4 of cooking platanos. Any other offers at proprietor’s discretion. NO YAMS, BREADFRUIT, ALCOHOL, STOLEN PROPERTY OR BULLETS.
Having the advantage of a fixed rate of exchange for real things rather than the floating rate of coin and paper representing something imaginary, this novel form of currency, unaffected by 200 per cent inflation as was the peso, almost replaced the latter and completely superseded those promissory notes issued by guerrillas in the past ‘to be redeemed after the revolution’. With time Dionisio’s table of equivalents became expanded to the point where it grew beyond anybody’s power to memorise, and conventions arose, such as that an almost ripe tomato was worth a third more than a green one or one that was so ripe that it was only any good for putting in a Portuguese sauce.
Far worse than any confusion ever caused by the new currency was the furore caused by Dionisio’s apparently innocent sale of all one hundred copies of Doña Barbara. In a town where television was an impossibility owing to the twelve-volt electrical supply and the absence of aerials, where the main source of stories was Aurelio’s recounting of myths and legends and the reconstruction of memories in bars, the books filled a gap in people’s lives that they had not hitherto perceived to be there at all.
A great hush descended, broken only by the braying of mules, the barking of dogs, the coughs and yowls of the jaguars as they ambushed each other, and the unrelenting drone of Father Garcia preaching to no one in particular in the plaza. The habit of literacy being unconsolidated, the hush lasted for an entire week whilst brows furrowed and lips silently repeated the text. Work stopped, or those working would cut alfalfa with the book in the left hand whilst the machete in the right swept aimlessly over the same spot. People read walking down the street, treading on the jaguars’ tails and tripping over the kerbs, bumping into each other and forgetting to go and eat what their spouses had failed to cook because it had burned unstirred in its pot.
Even Hectoro read the book. He was convinced that reading was a habit of women and homosexuals, and so he bought it from Dionisio saying that it was for one of his wives. He buried it in the depths of his mochila so that nobody would suspect him, and he rode daily out of the city and around the upward slope of the valley. Hectoro wore a black leather glove on his rein hand, and for once in his life this hand held the book whilst the reins fell slack across the horse’s neck. Hectoro read the book fiercely and with machismo, which is how he did everything; his moustache twitched, his nostrils flared at the moments of violence, and his lips uttered criticisms of Santos Luzardo for not giving Marisela the good lancing that she wanted. He burned his mouth on the cigar that was clenched in his teeth because he sucked it too hard when it was a stub and the Wizard had gone out to kill the hero, and he spat it out with an unmanly yelp, looking furtively around to make sure that there was no witness.
Hectoro read upside down, because when he was a child and his mother had taught him to read there had been only one book. His mother had taught Hectoro and his little sister at the same time, and he had had to peer over the top of the page in order to follow his mother’s finger as it hesitantly followed the print.
But reading on horseback whilst the horse browsed the grasses proved to be an unmanning experience, owing to an unfortunate coincidence. Hectoro reached a phrase. It was ‘the preliminary characteristic’. This phrase struck Hectoro as a real pansy phrase, a phrase worthy of the most effeminate, simpering homosexual. He bellowed with disgust at exactly the same moment that two chinchillas ran under the feet of the daydreaming horse. Startled by the terrible curse and the scurrying of the rodents, the horse reared violently and then kicked out with its back legs.
For the first and only time in his life Hectoro was thrown by a horse. He landed on his backside in an acacia, with the book still open in his left hand and a cigar still smoking between his teeth. ‘Hijo de puta,’ he exclaimed, ‘this reading is dangerous business.’ He drew out his revolver and shot the book through the centre where he had thrown it on the ground, and then he shot it again to make sure. It was for this reason that Hectoro was the only one who bought two copies of Doña Barbara, and for this reason that he changed his tune about reading. ‘This is a thing for real men,’ he declared, and from then on he read openly on horseback in the plaza, even though nobody believed he was really reading at all, since the book was upside down.
But Hectoro’s experience was less bitter than that of the whole town, because there followed a plague of literary criticism, never a pretty thing at the best of times. It was an execrable time of ‘guachafita’, because everyone felt entitled to join in, even those who had not read it because they were illiterate and had had to listen to someone else’s résumé.
The town divided into three factions: those who thought the book was unreservedly marvellous, those who believed it to be horse-manure, and those who thought it was part marvellous and part horse-manure. After everybody had finished the book there was a silence of two days whilst people thought about it and re-read certain bits. Felicidad re-read the end, where Santos Luzardo marries Marisela, in case she had missed any bits involving sex; she was disgustedly critical that what was obviously going to be the best portion had been missed out.
She had good reason to resent the lack of vicarious excitement. One day she had announced, ‘I am eighteen years old now, and I am giving up whoring. I have grown out of it.’ Radically opposed to chastity, she had set her cap at Don Emmanuel and had succeeded with a lamentable lack of difficulty, for he had always had a soft spot for her, mercurial, impulsive, beautiful and mischievous as she was. The trouble was that they were maintaining a separation at the time of the plague of reading. This was because one night he had eaten a pantagruelian quantity of Dolores’ frijoles refritos with three eggs beaten into it. Any gentleman would have leapt out of bed and released the consequences harmlessly into the night air outside the front door.
But Don Emmanuel had an English sense of humour exacerbated by his attendance at a progressive English public school, and instead he held the covers over Felicidad’s head and allowed the hurricane in his guts to belch forth uninhibited in a veritable tornado of inflammable and intensely malodorous gas. She writhed and screamed, bit and kicked, and then stormed out, vowing never to return, leaving Don Emmanuel helpless with mirth, tears streaming down his cheeks, convulsed and choking. Just now she was waiting for him to come and beg forgiveness, and she was missing him and his good points.
Misael and Sergio were intensely interested in the passages concerning the rounding up o
f cattle, and were in dispute over its realism. Hectoro was incensed by all the rustling and was in dispute with Josef about Santos Luzardo’s reluctance to resort to bullets. Pedro, who had hunted in Venezuela, thought that the colloquialisms were all wrong, whilst old man Gomez who had been there before Pedro said that they were exactly accurate. The Mexican musicologist fell out with his best friends, the French couple Antoine and Françoise, because the former did not believe that it was realistic to expect Doña Barbara’s character to change so much, and the two latter did. Ena and Lena, the identical twins married to the Mexican, pulled each other’s hair out in a catfight because Ena believed that the author was unsympathetic to Doña Barbara’s having been violated when she was fifteen, whereas Lena maintained that it was the author’s sympathy over this and the death of Hasdrubal that made him imply that Doña Barbara eventually found salvation. Perhaps the only one who did not quarrel with her mate was Remedios, since her consort could not read, was contemptuous of stories, and was still confused about having been dead for four hundred years before Aurelio brought him back to life. Remedios thought that Doña Barbara was right to have been such a warlord, since that was all that a woman could do in a world raped to the core by men, and Consuelo insulted her vilely for this, saying that a woman should behave better than a man and not sink to his level.
The disputes reached such a peak that one day they developed into a riot, known forever afterwards as ‘the Battle of Doña Barbara’. In this memorable fight in the plaza and on the street corners Dionisio’s entire profit from the book was raided from his house and transformed into missiles. Doña Constanza started it by throwing a bag of flour at Misael, which missed and went all over Rafael. He riposted with a mango that bounced off her skull and splattered itself all over Tomás, whereupon Tomás poured his glass of chicha over his brother Gonzago.
One thing led to another, as things do, and soon the mêlée had moved out of Consuelo’s whorehouse and into the streets, so that the jaguars scattered onto the roof-tops and growled in their throats whilst the people below argued the points of their literary positions at the tops of their voices whilst dodging half-chickens and grenadillos, launching their own papayas and skinned guinea pigs. Afterwards the jaguars came down and ate all the interesting bits, whilst the buzzards skipped amongst them competing with the dogs.
It is because of this that an amendment was made to the city’s constitution. Under the paragraph which says ‘In women, spitting in the street is not a sign of “gracia” and in men is not a sign of “machismo”’, it says ‘Fiction is not about anything real, and shall not be fought over’.
From this episode Dionisio deduced that the principle reason for religious schisms was that everybody derived their information from the same book. Having established this historiosophical point, he resolved never to sell large quantities of the same book at the same time. Farides and Profesor Luis were happy because the fight reminded them of the fiesta when they were married, and Don Emmanuel and Felicidad were reconciled because she got her revenge on him by jamming a mango in his mouth from behind, when he had opened it to shout encouragement to the combatants.
21 In Which Cristobal Confounds His Eminence With Pertinent Questions, And Monsignor Rechin Anquilar Imparts Sombre News
‘I THINK IT is very ugly in a pretty kind of way,’ said Cristobal, burying his nose in the flower to see whether or not it smelled of anything.
Cardinal Dominic Trujillo Guzman and his illegitimate, unacknowledged, but beloved son, were in the courtyard of the palace, out of reach of the stink of urine and offal that wafted up from the river. It was a private world of flowers and vines, with its own fountain that refreshed the pool for a dozen enormous golden orf, and broke the sunlight into rainbows. The Cardinal would often sit down here with a book in his lap, moving around as the sun caught up with his patch of shade, and Cristobal would poke around in the flower-beds with a stick, marvelling at the hummingbirds that fiercely staked their claims to ownership of a bush or a creeper, or a stand of orchids.
‘It is called a passion flower,’ said the Cardinal.
‘Mama reads books about passion,’ observed Cristobal. ‘It says “passion” on the front, and she won’t let me read them, or even look at the pictures.’
The Cardinal smiled indulgently. ‘This is a different kind of passion. Shall I tell you what the passion flower means?’
Realising that His Eminence was in one of his informative moods, Cristobal was indulgent in his turn. ‘Yes please.’
The Cardinal pointed delicately with his forefinger, and the sun flashed from the ruby of his ring, something that Cristobal loved to see it made the Cardinal seem glamorous as well as important.
‘These five petals and these five bits which are called “sepals” add up to ten, which is the twelve disciples not counting nasty Judas Iscariot and St Peter who disgraced himself but made up for it later. This frilly blue bit that looks like hairs all in a circle is the crown of thorns that they put on Our Lord’s head. These five greeny-yellow bits called “anthers” are the five wounds, and these three brown things called “stigmas” are the three nails. If you half-close your eyes and look at the leaves, they are like hands, and those are the hands of the bad people who persecuted Our Lord . . .’ His Eminence wound one of the tendrils around a finger, ‘. . . and this is the whip with which they whipped Him. It was this flower that the missionaries used to convert the Indians, did you know that?’
Cristobal screwed up his nose sceptically. ‘Being whipped with that wouldn’t hurt very much, would it?’
‘No, silly, it is supposed to remind you of the whip.’
‘You said it was the whip.’
The Cardinal straightened up and sighed. ‘The real whip was made of lots of bits of leather with lumps of lead in them so that it tears the flesh of your back away. They did it to make you die quicker on the cross, so they say, but some people took a week to die all the same.’
Cristobal pulled a disgusted face. ‘And he died to make up for everybody’s sins, so that all the sins disappeared and the Devil had to let everybody go out of hell?’
‘Yes, child.’
‘Why couldn’t he just forgive everybody rather than go through all that?’
‘He has forgiven everybody . . .’ but the Cardinal trailed off, never having had to answer this question before, and anxious not to confuse the little boy with complex explanations.
‘Mama says that you are always worried about your sins.’
‘Everybody should be, Cristobal.’
‘I’m not. If my badness is all forgiven, I can do as I like. I can throw stones at birds and not eat my fruit, and I can be rude, and pull girls’ hair and not say my prayers and things.’
‘God forgives, but I might not until I have sent you to bed with no supper and slapped your leg, so you can forget all about that.’
Cristobal smiled, exposing the quirky alignment of his milkteeth, and the Cardinal whipped out his handkerchief to arrest the flow of a new blob of green mucus. ‘No, you cannot eat it,’ said His Eminence, pre-empting the predictable request.
‘I didn’t want to,’ said Cristobal, playing at being petulant. ‘Mama says I should only pick my nose in private. She says everybody does, so I was going to wait. Why did they kill Jesus?’
‘Because, my little Señor Curiosidad, He said and did things that got Him into trouble with the Jewish priests. We know that He was right, but from their point of view He was a heretic.’
‘How do we know He was right?’
‘Your questions are killing me, Cristobal. You are more full of questions than Mama’s books of quizzes.’
‘You don’t know, do you?’ said Cristobal with a triumphant gesture.
‘Of course I know. I am a Cardinal. It is my job to know.’
‘Tell me then.’
‘O dear,’ said the Cardinal, looking at the clock on the tower, ‘it is your bedtime. You had better run along or your mama will be angry with us.?
??
Cristobal frowned and turned to go. ‘And another thing. Why do you wear a dress?’
The Cardinal jocularly raised his hand as if to strike his son, and performed the familiar trick of converting the blow into a scratch on the head. ‘To show that I am a Cardinal. Go on, off with you.’
Cristobal cartwheeled away across the lawn and pulled a face at His Eminence from behind the safety of a pillar. ‘Diablillo,’ called his father, ‘get thee behind me.’
The little boy disappeared, and the Cardinal sat back in his chair and watched the hummingbirds. A few seconds later Cristobal’s sticky fingers closed over his eyes, there was a giggle, and a mischievous voice said, ‘See, I got behind you, and you didn’t even notice.’
The Cardinal grabbed the boy’s wrists and, holding him at arm’s length, carried him screaming and kicking with delight towards the kitchens, where he handed him over to Concepcion. She grabbed his legs, and they swung him up and down until he was crying with laughter.
In the audience room an hour later the Cardinal was waiting for the appearance of Mgr Rechin Anquilar, who was supposed to be arriving in order to report upon the progress of the crusade of preaching. He was half an hour late, and so His Eminence crept to the window to see if the pious widows were outside waiting to catch a glimpse of him. They were, and so he ducked back, his intention of looking out over the city frustrated. ‘I wish,’ he thought, ‘that Concepcion would stop wearing lavatory rolls in her hair. It may be all the fashion with blacks and mulattas, but to me it is ridiculous. Perhaps if I say nothing, it will pass.’
The smell from the river contained something new. What was it? He tested the air with his nose. It was the smell of corpses. Perhaps that was why Concepcion had given him a new medicine to protect him from ‘qhayqa’, a disease of which he had never heard, and which she said was caused by the stench of death. No doubt something had been washed up on the banks.