She laughed at the compliment, and then a cloud passed across her face at the mention of her sister. ‘She has been stupid,’ she said. ‘Come out and see.’
At the back of the house Ines was arranging macaw feathers around the windscreen of Dionisio’s car. She glanced up as the two came out of the back of the house, gasped with shame, and ran off up the hillside with her arm across her face. Almost immediately she stumbled over a rock and fell sprawling. Striding forward, Dionisio went to where she lay and pulled her up by the armpits, only to find that she still held her arm across her face and would not look at him. He held her wrist and forced her arm away from her face. ‘Look at me,’ he said.
Very slowly she turned, and the first thing that he noticed was that her lips were quivering and her eyes were full of tears. The next thing he saw was that a diagonal chalky blotch had spread itself unevenly from her forehead to her neck, and his first thought was that she had been parasitised by some disfiguring fungus. Then he realised what it was and was shaken with anger.
‘This is skin-whitener. For the love of God, Ines, how could you be so stupid?’ He was so furious that for a second his hand was raised to strike her, but then he beheld her misery and his hand fell to his side. He turned to Agapita. ‘Everyone knows that this stuff is a catastrophe. For God’s sake, why has she done it?’
‘It was for you,’ said Ines. ‘When she begins her bleeding and becomes a woman she wants to be one of your women, and she thinks that you will like her more if she is white.’
He was dismayed and astonished. He looked down at the girl where she lay sobbing. She had the beautiful dark skin of one who is an Indian with a little Negro mixed in for good effect, skin of the colour that many white women lie in the sun for weeks in order to achieve. His anger was unabated; he laid his own forearm alongside her own and demanded, ‘What colour is this? Is it not darker than yours? Do you wish to insult me?’
Agapita put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Be kind to her, she knew no better,’ and Dionisio said, ‘Does she still have that stuff? Will you bring it to me?’
Agapita went back into the choza and came out with the bottle. He took it from her and inspected the label. He memorized the name of the company that made it, and then hurled it away up the mountainside. The bottle smashed with a dull pop, and he bent down and lifted Ines to her feet. He rubbed his hand across her cheek and shook his head, ‘You are very stupid,’ he said, ‘you were always going to be one of my women, I was just waiting for you.’
The young girl’s heart leapt in her breast, and she smiled through her tears. A little smirk of mischief came to her lips. ‘And Agapita?’
He turned to the older sister with surprise upon his face. ‘You too?’
The girl shrugged, raised her arms a little, let them fall to her side, and said, ‘Who else is there? All the men have gone to the towns.’
He raised his eyebrows and contemplated the fate that had conspired to make of him a responsible Don Juan. He noticed that his pet jaguars had climbed up onto the roof of the house and were sybaritically enjoying the sunshine after their days in the chill of the sierras. ‘No more skin-whitener,’ he said, and the girls shook their heads. ‘Copy them, and lie in the sun until you have returned to your colour,’ he instructed Ines, pointing to the cats.
‘You will sleep the night with me on the way back,’ announced Agapita, continuing her own train of thought.
Dionisio’s next campaign in the pages of La Prensa was against skin-whitener, but even after he had succeeded in getting it prohibited, people continued to bring it in as contraband. Countless exploited women continued to despoil the velvet darkness of their skin at inflated prices in the vain hope of raising their status and their desirability.
But visitors to Santa Maria Virgen are sometimes shown a place on the mountainside where once upon a time Dionisio Vivo threw a bottle of skin-whitener, and there sprang up a purple lily blotched with white as a perpetual reminder to all races to set their own beauty at a proper value.
31 The Erotica Symphony
THE ABANDONED CHILDREN of the sewers were disappearing. The priests and nuns, the conscientious privileged, the good widows, the few socialists prepared to redistribute their own wealth, all found that the grimy children were evaporating away. Familiar faces at the soup-kitchens no longer appeared, and the number of ragged, rachitic little scarecrows begging at the entrances to the marbled shops and emporia seemed daily to diminish. Respectable housewives and anxious shop-managers breathed sighs of relief and said, ‘I am glad that at last something is being done. It was a disgrace.’ Shoppers no longer clutched at their wallets or repeatedly checked for that reassuring bulge in the backpocket that contained their credit cards, their driving licence, their cedula. Conversations no longer had to be made louder and more intense in order to avoid hearing, ‘Help me, good señor, just a little change,’ and one no longer had to look straight ahead and avoid turning one’s head to see the pathetic faces with infected eyes and the matted mops of hair that almost visibly crawled with lice and ticks.
The mystery of the evaporation of the cloud of children was connected with another, simultaneous mystery. The river’s stench became ever more intolerable until it was unbearable to live with one’s windows open. The group of pious widows no longer stood on the riverbanks waiting to catch the blessing of Cardinal Guzman, but he was unable to enjoy the relief of their absence because the reek of deliquescence seeped even through the window-frames of the palace. He taped around the places where a draught might enter, and bought electric fans for his chambers.
The truth was that a little private enterprise had entered into the solution of the town’s social problems. Vigilante groups of the right-wing lower middle classes had identified the dispossessed and forlorn children as the fountainhead that fed and renewed the ever-growing criminal underclass that was making life in the city impossible. The children grew up into the vandals who scratched one’s car with keys; they became the latchbreakers who crawled through lavatory windows and made off with one’s new watch; they became the thugs who raped smartly dressed women on their own front lawns, and became the footpads who cut open the pockets of men who wore suits, stealing their grandfathers’ silver cigarette-cases; they became the lounging and sneering youths who drowned out entire neighbourhoods with Yanqui music played on tape-recorders bought with the spoils of theft. At first the blackshirted vigilantes merely drove them back into the sewers, and beat them up when they caught them.
But then the owners of shops began to pay the vigilantes to keep the children away from their premises, believing rightly that customers would rather not enter shops at all than have to clamber over cardboard shelters and recumbent bodies, encountering the bewildered desperation in those huge brown eyes. The children sleeping above the central-heating ducts or sheltering from the rain in doorways were driven away by hails of truncheon blows, with insults raining about their broken heads.
But one thing leads to another. The lost children of the city now slept beneath the waters of the river outside the Cardinal’s palace. They slept with their legs encased in concrete and their right hands missing, since a right hand was what one needed to collect the businessmen’s bounty, and the sound of shots at night was put down to terrorist activity and the internal feuds of the coca lords. The police knew all about it, but did nothing because no one would have given them any thanks. The innocents slept and the crime-rate remained the same, because normally they would have died anyway at an early age, and the criminal underclass maintained its numbers thanks to the slums and the disaffected youths who fled the peasant life of the countryside and the uncomfortable scrutiny of the neighbours and the parish priest.
His Eminence was nauseated by the smell from the river and was paralysed by the fermenting agony in his entrails. These days he would be attacked at least daily by sudden pangs that maddened him and made him retch long strings of saliva that somehow could not be wiped from his mouth. The more his belly g
rew the less he could eat, and Concepcion resigned herself to making thin soups and cooling drinks. The perpetual dread of the next access of pain so distracted him that he could concentrate on nothing at all, and the burden of running the Church became increasingly laid upon the nervous shoulders of his new secretary, who would come with the aid of intense prayer to decisions that he hoped the Cardinal himself would have made, had he not been ill.
As if to crown his misery and his lifetime’s accumulation of guilt, His Eminence now lived in the perpetual and visible company of his demons. Mgr Rechin Anquilar had come to visit him, to tell him that he was going to bring together all his missions into one vast crusading entity, and His Eminence had not been able to listen to him because the Contending Heads were biting at each other’s necks under the desk. The Obscene Ass was winding his donkey’s penis round and around the Monsignor’s neck, the Smiters were crying out as they pounded the walls with cudgels carved from human limbs that rang with the mockery of gongs. The Litigators disputed so loudly and with such vehemence that he could scarcely hear the Monsignor’s indignant words about the mistreatment of his missionaries. The Flaming Ones wrote in the air with fire the names of all his sins, and the Dispersers seemed somehow to fix upon his thoughts before he thought them, so that the words of his own mouth emerged as gibberish. Every thought that passed through this malign censorship, every thought that struck him as noble or true, was confuted by the Falsifiers. They would sit in front of him in a row upon the desk, their skinny legs swaying back and forth as if upon the point of detaching themselves from the rotund bellies with their huge spiral navels, and they would somehow prove with impeccable logicality that God was evil, that it was right to steal, that hell was a garden of Eden. His Eminence would dispute loudly with them, his voice ringing around the palace, until, his hands over his face, he would howl with anguish and kick over the chairs in order not to hear them, only to find that the Accusers could shout even louder from the inside of his own head, taunting him with his paternity, his veniality, his fallible humanity.
He achieved rest in the arms of Concepcion and in the company of Cristobal. It seemed that the demons could not penetrate the citadels of human love, and he would therefore stay in bed longer with Concepcion in the morning. He would send Cristobal to bed so late that the little boy would be puffy-eyed with exhaustion and have to be carried after midnight to his room, already fast asleep in his father’s arms.
His Eminence found also that the demons could not withstand beauty. He could send them flying from the room in clouds of pungent smoke simply by placing the Eroica symphony upon the record-player, and they would return instantly after the last bar of the final presto. He played the record over and over, every day, until he knew each note of it by heart.
But one day he awoke from a light slumber in his chair when the record had finished, to find that the Falsifiers were sitting patiently in front of him. ‘She was right, you know,’ said the one with the eye consisting of worms. ‘This music is like making love.’
‘This symphony was originally named “The Erotica”, contributed the one whose sinuous tongue wriggled continually down in order to linger caressingly upon its own wrinkled pudenda.
‘It depicts the sexual acts,’ proclaimed the one who always assumed a professorial air, and whose long bony forefinger would lever out its own eye so that it could hold it aloft and see behind itself. ‘And that is why we cannot stand it.’
His Eminence leapt to his feet and replaced the stylus of his gramophone upon the record. At the first chord the demons squealed and gibbered, clapped the palms of their hands to their ears, and fled through the walls to sulk and hide in the farthest corners of the palace.
His Eminence settled down to listen to the symphony, and became a prey to suggestibility. He furrowed his brow as he began to perceive the unchastity of the music. Dismayed, he went to the telephone to ask the librarian of the palace to bring him a copy of the score, if it could be found on the shelves of the long-unvisited musical section.
The librarian arrived, out of breath from the stairs, and handed him a yellowed and stained Henry Litolff edition that no one had previously perused in all its many decades of existence. His Eminence settled down with it and flicked through its pages. His first impression was that of amazement that anyone had ever written any symphonies at all. There was so much of it, and the composer must have had to hear every detail of the music as it unfolded in his imagination, adjusting it here and there in order to achieve intellectual and emotional effects, tinkering with sonorities, bearing in mind the ranges and limitations of different instruments. A symphony was a staggering achievement, enough to make one believe that the voice of God echoed in the mind of man.
The Cardinal put the record back to the beginning and tried to follow the score as the music unfolded. He found it difficult, even though he had learned some piano as a child, and he became lost on the third page. He sighed, and noticed with a start that there were two parts on the bass clef marked for ‘fagotti’. Was that not the gringo slang for ‘homosexual’? Could Beethoven really have written parts for homosexuals? He rang down to the library again and discovered that ‘fagotti’ were bassoons. He put the record back to the beginning once more, and followed the music with his finger.
Yes. The opening forte chords were very like the sudden arousal that one experiences upon catching sight of a beautiful and sensual woman, and then, ‘piano’, there was a period like the romantic wistfulness that one undergoes in thinking about her and imagining what one could say to her if only an accidental encounter might be arranged. There were violent triple chords like pelvic thrusts – could she be seduced already? – and then there were tripping violins just exactly like the teasing and fractional contact of slender fingers tickling the hairs of the perineum. Then there were more violent chords like pelvic thrusts, but perhaps they were really the tight embraces that one made during the first hugs of relief at the revelation of mutual attraction.
Sweat broke out upon the Cardinal’s brow. The plaintive oboe at the beginning of the second movement portrayed indubitably the enervation of post-coital depression, when one somehow feels disappointed that the world has not been transformed as one had expected. Then at the bar marked ‘maggiore’, there began a new cheerfulness that signalled the return of tumescence. There were more great chords at the excitement of re-entry, but then somehow the erection failed, because it was too soon after the previous one perhaps, and there was a loss of confidence in the section marked ‘minore’. But then the music cheered up again because the violins were sending shivers up and down the legs, because the woman was smiling salaciously and tantalising the man with excruciatingly exquisite foreplay, and then she was reaching under him as he made love to her, stroking his testicles so that suddenly he came. And this new ‘piano’ was the acute sensitivity of the penis after orgasm when one lies perfectly still, enclosed in her embrace, because one is afraid of the pain of withdrawal. ‘Ay,’ and the abrupt sforzando depicts the gasp of that withdrawal, followed by the muted collapse that is the sweet obliteration of sleep.
The Cardinal stood up to turn the record over, and tripped over his own feet, his mind whirling with the indecency of the symphony. With shaking hands he placed the needle at the beginning of the scherzo that introduces the third movement, and returned to his chair. He was no longer attempting to follow the music in the score, because he knew in advance what to expect. It was the merry exhilaration of waking up in the morning with a new woman in one’s bed, and here was a crescendo at just exactly the moment when the warmth of her body imparts a refreshed and urgent erection. Here one is romping and playfighting with her, hitting her softly upon the head with the pillow, pinning her to the mattress in order to spread kisses all over her face and neck, wriggling against the soft mound of her pubis. Tickles and nibbles. A muting to lascivious caress. More slim, travelling fingers.
The fourth movement begins, and there is mischief in the pizzicato of the strings ??
? what is she up to now? There is a surprising swelling of the music; she has squirmed against him and deliciously ambushed his penis, which is now inside her, and they are making love again with breath-catchingly brief increases of momentum, the emphasis upon the first beat of each bar because he is thrusting and resting, thrusting and resting. The Cardinal recognises his technique for avoiding premature climax. There is triumphant brass because he is about to come, and then there is quiet. What has happened? Has he come too soon after all? No, he has just managed to hold back because she is not quite ready yet. He begins again with little dips and thrusts. O God, it is as if the ring of her cervix is nibbling at the tip of his glans. There are crescendos and retractions; can he hold himself any longer? The Cardinal is on the edge of his seat with the drama of it, and then the presto begins and a mighty orgasm of terrific thrusts throws her pelvis into the air and she is clawing at the pillows and he is going as deep as he can so that it is as if he is disappearing inside her, and the bed skids upon the parquet, and they have thundered to sobbing contractions and the symphony has finished.
His Eminence rose to his feet and clenched his fist in the air like an aficionado who has just seen his favourite matador triumph over a brave bull. Then his hand fell limply to his side and he sank back into his chair. He leaned forward to lift the record off the player, and tilted it back and forth so that he could play with the light that reflected across it. ‘Beautiful but evil,’ he said, and he walked to his secretary’s office. ‘I want you to write to the Interior Minister, telling him that, in the interests of public morals, Beethoven’s third symphony must be banned.’
The astonished secretary smiled nervously, ‘Are you serious, Your Eminence?’ and the Cardinal shot him a look of lordly impatience. He wrote it, but after much prayer, he could not bring himself to send it, preferring to spare his master the public ridicule, even at the expense of his own employment.