It is to record such strange events that I keep this occasional journal, having resolved to keep a log of all things untoward that transpire in this city. Whilst I was still in the Army I was possessed by the desire to taxonomise all the hummingbirds and butterflies of the nation, but since I deserted and came here I find myself more fascinated by the marvellous reality of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, where I can forget all about being the famous General Carlo Maria Fuerte, and submerge myself in the life of this people whose beliefs and activities are more exotic than a morpho butterfly or an oropendola.
There are two facets to this people which mark them off from others; one is their capacity for love and the other is their mania for construction. But having said that, I realise that I might just as well have put ‘their capacity for merriment and their thirst for knowledge’. It is just that their love affairs and their edifices and contraptions are perhaps the most obvious. It is certainly the truth that the pursuit of an amour is of infinitely greater importance to them than anything else, but to an outsider I daresay that the most immediately striking thing would be the labour of their hands. It is only when one has lived here a while that one notices that this latter is only something indulged in when having a break from the former.
The first sight that a traveller beholds when standing on the cliffs above the town is a map of the world. This came about in the first place when Profesor Luis did a survey and discovered that only ten per cent of the people knew where their country was. He was so alarmed by this that he decided to issue a Mercator projection to everybody upon a piece of paper, but came up immediately against the problem that paper is an extreme scarcity in these parts, and moreover the children grew rapidly weary of copying it out over and over. He went to Dionisio Vivo, and they resolved to construct a map of the world so large that lessons in geography could be conducted either in a boat or from the heights above.
There was at the western end of the valley an area of icy swampland butting onto the curve of the river, and it is in that place that the mappa mundi is now situated. Profesor Luis, old man Gomez, Dionisio Vivo, Misael, Fulgencia Astiz and numerous others who helped upon a casual basis, such as some of the Spanish soldiers that Aurelio brought back from the dead, first drained the swamp by cutting a channel that joined the river further down. This accomplished, they set to work digging out the oceans and piling up the spoil to form the continents. They then modelled the landscape to include ranges of mountains, and planted the whole lot with appropriately coloured flowers, green for fertile areas and yellow for deserts. All this was on a massive scale, taking many months, and at the end of it all they dammed up the chanel and allowed the ‘oceans’ to fill with water. But this was not all. Not only did Profesor Luis pole the curious around upon a raft, lecturing eruditely upon the various countries, but Aurelio somehow caused a shower of edible fish that populated the waters, and a flock of ducks took up permanent residence, providing us with delicately flavoured eggs. It is most impressive to climb up above and look down upon this cartographical masterpiece, and at night it is very calming to lie in one’s hammock listening to the soothing conversation of the frogs.
Whilst upon this subject I should not fail to record the extraordinary achievement in rebuilding all the terraces up the mountainsides that had once supplied the city in Inca times. They did this by very cannily cutting up into bricks the alluvial soil that had buried the city during the time of its inundation, thus serving two purposes at once. Nowadays these ‘andenes’ are literally draped with vegetables, and those parts that have been harvested are used for sheep and goats which graze off the stalks. The people have also constructed a vast machine in order to reach the plateau below, and they have largely repaired every one of the old stone buildings; I am prompted to speculate that the spirit of the Incas lives on in these parts and has infected the souls of the people with monumentophilia, if there be such a word.
They also have a great liking for stories, which is probably why they spend so much time in the plaza. Here they may listen to the sermons of Father Garcia, who never fails to amuse people by his ability to levitate when involved in his narratives. These sermons consist mainly of complicated stories told in a vernacular and frequently racy style, and are usually about the doings of angels and devils. They seem to be designed to explain morals and the supernatural reasons for the world being as it is. Theologically his ideas are most heterodox, if not actually crazy, but the levitation trick convinces many of their truth, as well as the interesting blue nimbus that develops about his head.
In the plaza, too, one can overtly eavesdrop upon the tales told by Aurelio to his dead daughter, Parlanchina. It seems that he waits in the plaza for her, until she lets herself be known by playing a trick upon him. She runs away with his hat, or she puts her hands over his eyes and says, ‘Guess who?’ or she steals his coca gourd from his mochila. Aurelio reproves her, and then he says, ‘OK, I will tell you a story, but only if you stop your pranks and listen.’
On the day when the three-hundred-year-old man arrived, he had already told three stories, the one about how the armadillo knitted his own shell and had to knit the last bits with looser knots in order to get it done in time for a party because he had got the date wrong, the one about the woman Sabare who discovered the culinary uses of salt, and the one about the woman who married a jaguar and supplied her village with meat until she became a jaguar herself, whereupon her ungrateful family killed her and became the cause of the jaguar’s perpetual disillusionment. He was just commencing the one about the abused children who danced out of their village and went to the night sky, which is why one must never strike a child, when the stranger appeared at the end of the line of obelisks, crying at the top of his voice, ‘Has anyone seen the beast? Has anyone seen the beast?’
As he drew near we could see that he was a scrawny individual mounted upon a sorry horse. He was clad in hessian sackcloth improvised into a tunic, his feet were bare in the stirrups, and he carried a long stave which he clearly believed to be a lance. He had long, thin grey hair and a beard of the same ilk, and his skin was saddle-leather brown from his years in the sun. His eyes were like black pinpoints, which made me think that perhaps he had been smoking marijuana, and when he spoke he did so with exaggerated gestures that reminded me of the villain in a melodrama. He rode up to us, interrupting Aurelio’s tale, and glared down imperiously. ‘Is the beast here?’
‘What beast?’ asked Misael, grinning from ear to ear and nudging Josef, as if to share the judgement implicit to all that here was a lunatic.
The man appeared perplexed. ‘What beast?’ he echoed. ‘The beast that takes many shapes, but whose stomach rumbles like the sound of a pack of dogs running in the distance. Have you seen it?’
‘That would be Don Emmanuel after frijoles refritos,’ called out Felicidad, and everybody laughed.
‘And where is this Don Emmanuel?’ demanded the stranger. ‘I must kill him.’ Whereupon Don Emmanuel stepped forward, thrusting out his great paunch and his red beard, his eyes twinkling with humour. With a motion so fast that it seemed that we had not seen it, the stranger struck the unfortunate Don Emmanuel upon the side of his head with the stave, and the latter fell to the ground as though felled by lightning. Felicidad threw herself upon the assailant, dragging him from his horse, pulling out tufts of hair and and biting him so severely in the shoulder that he bled generously from the wound.
Once the mêlée had subsided and Don Emmanuel had returned to this world, sitting upon the ground ruefully rubbing his skull, we were able to listen to the old man, who apparently had often been the victim of such misunderstandings. ‘The reason for my lamentable appearance,’ he said, ‘is that I am three hundred years old and cannot die until I have finished off the beast. I have travelled in that time many times around the world, even swimming the oceans, which always causes the death of my horse so that I have to buy another one, and I still have not found the beast.’ He shook his head in a resigned manner, and the M
exican musicologist said, ‘Surely, cabrón, it would be better not to kill this beast, and then you would live forever, no?’
The old man sighed and looked up somewhat patronisingly, as though the Mexican were incapable of understanding. ‘I am more tired than if I were infested with hookworm,’ he said, ‘and I wish for the peace of death more than a young man longs for a woman. Can you perceive how wearying it might be to travel upon horseback for two hundred and fifty years, looking for the beast? I have had thirty-three horses, and every time one of them dies I am consumed with grief. All my friends are long dead. Is there a place to eat?’
Fulgencia Astiz, that fearsome Santandereana, took him to Doña Flor’s, which is what Dolores calls her restaurant, and many others crammed themselves in there in order to satiate their curiosity. Dolores told them to eat or get out, but nobody moved, and we watched the old man eat two tortillas, three enchiladas, a chimichanga, a dish of sancocho, a dish of pumpkins stewed with chicken and sweetcorn, a whole pineapple, two guinea pigs, and the leg of a small vicuña. I need not remark that we were all entirely astonished, and he informed us that his digestive system, being three hundred years old, was most inefficient, and that therefore he was obliged to eat enormous quantities in order to be able to extract even a minimum of nutrition. He paid Dolores with coins from an old leather bag, these coins clearly bearing the head of King Pedro the First of Brazil. Dionisio took these up to the capital eventually, and came back with several thousand pesos for Dolores.
The stranger then mounted his horse and rode forlornly away in quest of his beast, having extracted from Aurelio the promise that he should be summoned if anybody ever saw it. I often dream of him fighting the beast, but I can never quite see exactly what the beast is. It is like a flurrying blur that screeches.
24 Return To Rinconondo
ABUELA TERESA WAS a special person, and was the cause of the notice in the church which said, ‘No rosaries, by special request of Our Lady’. When she was no more than twelve years old she had gone to the grotto of the three statues, and was at that crucial age when the sudden burgeoning of an adolescent’s sexuality finds itself both expressed and assuaged by an access of religious fervour. She had fallen in love with Christ. He was forever before her imagination, clothed in glory but His wounds still bleeding, and she felt herself enclosed both by His enveloping feminine gentleness and His powerful masculine protection. Her face radiated serenity and contentedness such that her fresh beauty aroused no lust in men who saw her, and even at that age she possessed the extraordinary ability to love animals in a way that was entirely foreign to the community of peasants to which she belonged, a community which treated its beasts with casual cruelty at worst, and with exploitative indifference at best. In those days she had a capuchin monkey as a pet, which she used to carry on her chest, its arms about her neck in an embrace of perpetual affection, and its cheek against hers.
At the grotto she sat by the waterfall and detached the monkey so that she could say the rosary. It scampered into the branches of a flamboyant tree, and amused itself by plucking the blossoms whilst she closed her eyes, crossed herself at the crucifix, said the Apostles’ Creed, and began the Our Father of the first bead. She was saying the second Hail Mary of the third bead when a silvery voice said, ‘Teresa, please stop.’ She opened her eyes and looked about her, saw nothing, and said the Glory Be. Having reached the bead at the bottom of the loop, she commenced the ten Hail Marys of the first mystery, but had reached only the second when the same silvery voice again interrupted: ‘Teresa, should I have to ask you twice?’
Startled, she opened her eyes and looked up to behold a nimbus about the head of the statue of the Virgin, a nimbus so bright that it was impossible to gaze upon the face behind it. She shielded her eyes and trembled, but found herself unable to rise to her feet and run. ‘I want you to know,’ said the voice, ‘that I would be very relieved to hear no more rosaries.’
Young Teresa could think of nothing intelligent or interesting to say, and so she asked, ‘Why?’ and instantly regretted her impertinence.
There came a profound sigh from behind the blaze of light, a sigh that seemed to express a weariness older than the world. ‘How would you like it, Teresa, to listen to all that? Just imagine, for one complete rosary I have to listen to six Our Fathers, an Apostles’ Creed, six Glory Bes, a lengthy litany, a concluding prayer, and fifty-three Hail Marys. Some people work their way through all fifteen mysteries, and then I have to listen to one hundred and fifty Hail Marys.’
‘One hundred and sixty-five,’ corrected Teresa.
‘Quite so,’ returned the voice, ‘and it is more than I can continue to bear. Just imagine, Teresa, at any one time there are millions of people all over the world gabbling through this in indecent haste. It is like having one’s head stuck permanently in a buzzing hive of angry bees. If you wish to say the rosary, please say only one Hail Mary for each mystery, and say it slowly and with attention.’
Teresa, never one to accept anything without question, protested, ‘But, My Lady, it says on my rosary card that at Fatima you urged the world to say it, and it says that the rosary was given to St Dominic in order to combat heresy.’
There came another sigh out of the eight corners of the universe. ‘Between you and me, St Dominic has much to answer for. Will you do as I ask?’
‘Yes, My Lady,’ said Teresa, still shielding her eyes against the ineffable and now pulsating effulgence of the light.
‘And another thing,’ continued the voice, ‘I have a message from My Son. He says that you must learn to love Him not as He is, alone, but as you find Him in your fellows.’
From that time on, no rosaries were said in the pueblito of Rinconondo, and Teresa would look for Jesus in the faces of her family, in the broken teeth of itinerant beggars, behind the eyes of the mayor, in the artificial gaiety of the village whores, and in the embraces of the man who was to live with her all her life until he died shortly before her seventieth birthday. When this occurred, Teresa bought another capuchin monkey from one of Don Mascar’s peons, realising that such a harmless love would be sufficient to last her to the day of her own demise, bringing it to an end in a satisfyingly circular manner.
Teresa was sitting in the plaza shelling castana nuts and feeding some of the kernels to her companionable monkey when Fathers Valentino and Lorenzo reappeared in the pueblo at the head of a ruffianly band of twenty men, most of them mounted upon mules or horses, and all of them armed with rifles and machetes.
Who were these men, and the thousands like them who swelled the ranks of the crusaders? This is something worthy of explanation, because it has been a puzzle to many who have looked back over these events and wondered how it was that a nation already so troubled by internal divisions and gangsterism should have succumbed to a revival of the interminable religious conflict that had plagued it for decades and been apparently resolved by uneasy constitutional compromises. In the past the Liberals had mercilessly slaughtered, tortured and raped in the name of the modern secular state, and the Conservatives had done exactly the same in the name of Catholic theocracy, the wars continuing so long that no one had ever known when one war was finished and another had begun. They were perpetuated until at the end of them no one could remember how they had started or what the initial objectives of the sides had been, so that the final peace treaty acceded to demands made by the Liberals that had originally been those of the Conservatives, and the latter insisted upon the inclusion of clauses which had originally been fought for by the Liberals. The only way to conceive of the possibility of such an improbable outcome is to understand that there was in the national psyche an atavistic lust for excitement and combat which sought irresistibly to express itself not so much in the interest of causes, but upon the slightest and most inexcusably infantile pretexts. The nation possessed the kind of mentality that would see no contradiction in invading another country in order to impose pacifism upon it. Coupled with this, one might discern a cert
ain compulsive acquisitiveness that is so naive that it utterly fails to appreciate its own cynicism. An idealistic war would thus manifest itself as an orgy of theft that looted both the most insignificant possessions of the poor and the bodily integrity of the women. In such times the fear and contempt that men have for women explode into a cataclysm of rape and mutilation, and the lust for domination and extremes of experience leaves a trail of masculine dead who rot in the undergrowth, their testicles, heaving with maggots, in their mouths.
And so Fathers Lorenzo and Valentino had little difficulty in recruiting a ‘bodyguard’ that was bigger than they had expected and turned out to be too wilful for them to control, so that ultimately they had to resign themselves to its atrocities and console themselves with the thought that some evils are always perpetrated in the cause of a greater good. With the promise of plenary indulgence they found men who were prepared to leave the monotony of their wives’ control, men who would forsake badly paid and gruelling employment for the sake of an adventure, men who were happy to act tough in the name of Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild. The fathers would begin as leaders, and finish as accomplices for fear of becoming followers, which is exactly what happened to all the other priests who eventually found that their forces had congealed into a devastating plague of human locusts, at the head of whom was the dark and adamantine figure of Mgr Rechin Anquilar, who seemed to be everywhere at once, wheeling on his huge horse, the crucifix on its chain catching the light of burning huts and the red glow of the moon.
In the plaza the fathers rang their bell and called for repentance whilst their cohort of bodyguards lounged beneath the trees, replenished their water bottles from the trough, and some gathered sticks to make a fire with which they could cook some strips of meat, gaucho-fashion, upon the ends of their knives. The repetitive incantation drew the population from their houses, their eyes alight with amused curiosity and a certain wonder that the pestilential priests should have so imprudently reappeared after their previous humiliations. As before, a guava sailed through the air and flattened itself against the side of Father Lorenzo’s head. But this time a shot rang out, and the leader of the ruffians stood up menacingly. ‘Listen to the man preach,’ he said, and he spat on the ground with an air of finality. The people listened.