‘Remedios,’ said the General, oblivious of the Ambassador’s plight, ‘the name and the face are very familiar to me.’ He ransacked his brains until inspiration hit him. ‘It was a “wanted” poster, the leader of the People’s Vanguard.’
Dionisio was petrified that the General would take it into his head to go out and arrest her, and he hastily interrupted the General’s train of thought. ‘The People’s Vanguard was disbanded years ago after declaring peace, Papa. Are you enjoying your meal, Mama?’
Mama Julia, still smiling from the unusual effects of the coca leaves upon her unpractised psyche, nodded and replied, ‘Yes, but he is not.’
They followed the direction of her glance, and saw all at once that the British Ambassador was negligently inert with his face in a pool of dribble that had overflowed his plate and was dripping onto the floor.
‘Oh my God,’ said the General, holding up the empty jug, ‘He has drunk all of this. He must have thought it was aniseed-water.’
‘We will have to make him sick,’ said Dionisio.
‘He has pissed himself,’ observed Mama Julia inelegantly.
‘Language, my dear,’ remonstrated her husband, to which she replied unrepentantly, ‘Well, so he has,’ and she adjusted her plentiful hat to a new rakish angle. ‘How do I look?’
‘Today has been a terrible disaster,’ moaned Dionisio. ‘I was so hoping to impress you with our achievements. I will fetch Aurelio so that he can deal with the Ambassador.’
Whilst he was out a woman came in with a very little baby, and Mama Julia leapt to her feet in order to coo over it. It began to cry, puckering up its little face and punching the air with its arms and legs, and Mama Julia stuck a plump finger into its mouth in order to pacify it. ‘Poor pequeñito’s hungry,’ she said.
‘He is crying for lack of a name,’ said the young woman. ‘We have not had the ceremony yet.’
‘And what will pequeñito’s name be, then?’
‘Dionisito Vigesimo. Is he not sweet?’
Mama Julia repeated the name innocently, and then straightened up suddenly. ‘The twentieth little Dionisio? And who is the father?’
‘Dionisio, of course, the one with the scars on his neck.’
The General raised his eyes to the heavens, and Mama Julia’s eyes rolled in their sockets. ‘What? How many does he have?’
The girl smiled contentedly and bounced the child on her hip. ‘This is the newest Dionisito, and there are about twenty little Anicas as well.’
Mama Julia recovered instantly from the euphoria of the coca. She breathed deeply and said icily, ‘You are not old enough to have forty children.’
‘O there are hundreds of us.’
Mama Julia strode out of Doña Flor’s with the General in hot pursuit. She tore the flowery concoction from her head and rolled up her sleeves as she ran down the street after her son, shouting, ‘Come here you villain, you knave, you reprobate.’
She beat him about the head with her parasol whilst he shielded himself with his arms and a happy crowd of onlookers gathered around to urge her on. ‘Hernando,’ she cried, ‘do something! He is no son of mine! Disgrace to the family name! Whoremonger!’
The General disarmed her and held her wrists whilst she struggled and yelled, until, in the end, she burst into tears in his arms and said, ‘How can we afford forty presents for Saints’ Days?’
‘There, there,’ murmured the General, patting her head, and then, to Dionisio, ‘I will have a word with you later.’
The General was distracted by the appearance of Capitan Papagato and General Fuerte. Capitan Papagato had not been able to resist coming out to witness Dionisio’s beating with the parasol, even though he was afraid that General Hernando Montes Sosa would recognise him as the deserter that he was. Dionisio’s father indeed recognised him as the young captain who had changed his name in Valledupar to Papagato, and disappeared just after General Fuerte’s assassination. He was about to open his mouth to say he-knew-not-what, when General Fuerte himself appeared at a doorway whilst attempting to chase out of his house a small pig that had come in unobserved and begun to eat one of his shoes. General Fuerte had resolved not to show his face that day, because Montes Sosa had once been his second-in-command, and he had faked his own death in order to desert the Army.
The two old friends caught each other’s glance, and both stood still and silent, their mouths agape. Montes Sosa raised an arm and pointed, ‘But you are supposed to be dead.’
‘I am,’ said General Fuerte, who straightened up and shot back into his house.
General Hernando Montes Sosa put his hands to his face and shook his head for a few seconds. He took his hands away, muttered something to himself, and said to Dionisio, ‘You appear to have ghosts here as well as a harem.’
‘Aurelio’s daughter sometimes lives here,’ said Dionisio, ‘and she is dead. So is Federico, for that matter.’
The General sighed with extreme weariness. ‘Please can we have the concert now, and get it over with? I just want to go home.’
44 St Thomas Is Inspired to Mournfulness
THE INSATIABLE HEAT of the plains ate into the souls of the crusaders and reduced their hearts to dust. In the sky, quivering mirages of Arabian armies fought interminable battles amid illusory skyscrapers and scenes of pastoral idyll. The metal seats of tractors caused third-degree burns on the callused backsides of peons, and entire furtive conversations drifted for miles with perfect clarity, shocking the sensibilities of susceptible widows. The vibrating haze transformed everyday objects into rare and wondrous things, so that black cats appeared to be bowler hats and metal baths were metamorphosed into monolithic hovering armadillos. In the fields the oppressed cattle were parboiled months before the date of their slaughter, enduring hallucinations horrifying and incomprehensible, and horses preferred to fall unconscious on the end of a lariat rather than be hauled out of the shade.
The bodyguard persevered because the cool of the evening would provide new opportunities for rampage, and the clerics were sustained by either their foolishness or their exemplary zeal. Monsignor Rechin Anquilar, habituated to the cool altitude of the capital, felt himself transported into a metaphysical world where nothing was solid. Objects seemed to flow like liquid, bellydancing before his eyes in a grotesque parody of seduction, and the screeches and groans of wild animals near at hand supplied him with intimations of the torments of hell. In this inferno of abstraction he would long for the cool nights in his tent, persecuted by mosquitos, but raptly attentive to the monologue of the Angelic Doctor.
Rubicund, as bald as an admiral, as tall and erect as a Prussian grenadier, but inconceivably corpulent, St Thomas Aquinas hunched in the tent with his shining pate vanishing into the folds of the canvas. Anquilar awoke one night, quickened by the sweet aroma of a fat man’s perspiration, and beheld, in dark shadow, the massive bulk of the man he admired the most in all the world.
He sat up in his bed, rubbed his eyes, looked again, and enquired doubtfully, ‘St Thomas?’
The dark shadow nodded, and replied, ‘Do you have any conception of the boredom of death?’
‘No, indeed,’ replied the Monsignor.
‘Take it from me, my son, take it from me. When I died on the way to the Council of Lyon, I thought, “Aha, now I will see the truth,” but do you know what happened? I know not a jot more nor an iota less than when I was alive. Believe me, death is a disappointment. Now if you will excuse me, I have my usual appointment with Galileo, a most interesting man. He has a theory that matter is made of mathematical points and lines of no extension, and I, naturally, hold a more Aristotelian opinion. His view is heretical of course, because it endangers the doctrine of the Eucharist. I will see you tomorrow.’
On subsequent nights St Thomas appeared regularly at the same time to continue his disconnected flow of reminiscences, his colossal bulk occupying the space even on the other side of bed. In between each memory he would nod his head slowly, as if to say,
‘Yes, that is how it was,’ and the inebriation of immortality would cause his gaze to focus far behind the Monsignor, as though he were addressing him from a great distance. ‘I startled the King of France once . . . I was thinking about a refutation of the Manichees, and I thumped the table so that the king jumped out of his skin . . . did you know that we had to write in abbreviations to save parchment? It was very expensive, you see . . . Albertus Magnus, my teacher, once he made a mechanical head that talked and talked . . . it was so irritating . . . when he died I could not stand all that talking, and in the end I had it buried under the corridor . . . I always felt guilty about that . . . He once said of me that people said that I was as slow as an ox, but one day the whole world would listen to my mooing. Wasn’t that nice of him? I was kidnapped by my own family when I was young . . . I never intended to be a saint, you know, I just spent my whole life writing and eating . . . Albertus was a saint, but many said that he was a witch because of his marvellous inventions . . . Do you think that the dialogue is a successful way of writing philosophy? . . . Bishop Berkeley did it . . . He is still working on cures for constipation, and I say to him, “My dear Bishop, the dead do not suffer constipation,” that is what I say. Did you know that recently my Summa Theologiae was produced in sixty volumes by some university or other? I keep revising it, and now it is three thousand volumes, and Bishop Berkeley says to me, “My dear Doctor, not even the dead will read it . . . indeed death is a futile business.”’
‘I have read the sixty volumes,’ exclaimed Anquilar, ‘I have many passages by heart.’
This was the first time that Anquilar had interrupted the Doctor in his many nights of melancholy reflection, and the latter paused, struck by astonishment. ‘It is not worth it,’ he said. ‘I have completely rewritten it. When I was alive I had a revelation, and from that point I wrote nothing more on earth because all my words turned to straw, even the words I had already written.’
‘But your works are the foundation and corner stone of the Church,’ replied Anquilar. ‘Without your work there is no doctrine.’
St Thomas shrugged dismissively, ‘That’s how it is.’
A dreadful suspicion formulated itself in Anquilar’s mind: ‘You are not St Thomas, you are a demon sent by the Prince of Darkness to deflect me. Get thee behind me, devil; go, or I will exorcise you myself, satanic heresiarch.’
The shade shook its head slowly, ‘It won’t work. I have come on your crusade to see for myself the results of my work. I have come to see you forcing Jews and Muslims to eat pork in public, to see you extinguishing enquiry and burning innocents who have more enthusiasm than intellect. I am watching you confiscate the goods of the poor and torturing women for fear of your own lusts . . . Did you know that my own work was forbidden in the University of Paris? . . . If I were Satan I would be a fallen cherub, because the cherubim are derived from knowledge, which is compatible with mortal sin. Gregory the Great says that Satan before he fell wore all the other angels as his garment, transcending all in glory and knowledge . . .’
‘You are not St Thomas,’ repeated Anquilar.
‘Nonetheless, I will accompany you on your crusade for the good of my soul.’
‘Do not come near me,’ said Anquilar, crossing himself vigorously and muttering, ‘vade retro.’
From that time onwards Monsignor Rechin Anquilar received no more personal calls from the Doctor Angelicus. Instead the saint would wander contemplatively about the camp, the ruddy folds of his face reflecting the flames of the fires, his enormous body eclipsing the lanterns. Nobody saw him as he wandered sadly through the embers of incendiarised huts, stood upon hilltops to see the smoke of ruined pueblos, bent over the faces of broken children and ravaged girls, shaking his head with pity and resignation. Nobody saw him except Monsignor Anquilar, who wrote out from memory the saint’s own words about heresy, and waved the paper in his face at every crossing of their paths. The saint would look at him wearily, saying, ‘I have revised that passage.’
The incorporeal corpulent saint saw how it was that a regular pattern emerged from the wanderings of the crusaders across the llanos towards the sierras. They would reach a place outside a settlement and encamp there for the night. Early next morning they would process into the plaza, carrying banners and smoking thuribles. At their head would be El Inocente mounted on his black stallion, his face set with the zealous delight of doctrinal rage, and behind him would be the company of priests chanting the Veni Creator.
St Thomas, polymath and philosophical genius, partial empiricist and opponent of the Latin Averroists, would find himself taking notes like a schoolboy, taxonomising the varieties of outcome. In every place things always began well, because to all people the prospect of an impromptu fiesta was irresistible. People would leave the fields, having been fetched by breathless children, and pour into the plaza in anticipation of a great spectacle and formidable drunkenness and fornication thereafter. They would greatly enjoy the Monsignor’s sermon of generalised denunciation, but would fall into perplexed silence when invited to reveal the doctrinal errors of their fellows. Someone would crack a joke, such as, ‘Reinaldo believes that John the Baptist was really the Blessed Virgin,’ and then the disorder would begin as the bodyguard swung into instantaneous retribution. In large towns the civil authorities would mercilessly and summarily expel the crusaders, and in medium-sized towns someone would go to beg the intervention of the local caudillo or the powerful latifundistas with their armed vaqueros and peons, who would arrive at the gallop and chase the marauders away, leaving the town with one or two dead and a sorrowfully aborted fiesta. These episodes increased the Monsignor’s sense of outrage at the proliferation of satanic force in the country, and he would conduct impressive services of mass excommunication over the townsfolk at the nearest place of safety.
But in villages and hamlets where the number of crusaders was greater than the number of inhabitants, the Monsignor enjoyed greater prosperity and a richer spiritual harvest. In these isolated spots he managed to save many a soul by extracting from it a confession of orthodoxy and killing it before it had time to change its mind. ‘Christ’s faithful often wage war with unbelievers to prevent them from hindering the faith,’ he would say, quoting St Thomas, or, ‘With regard to heretics, there is the sin whereby they deserve not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death,’ omitting for the sake of swiftness the procedure by which heretics were given two admonitions and lengthy periods of reflection even in the days of the Italian Inquisition.
Perhaps the most remarkable episode took place when the crusade came face to face with another crusade in the pueblito of Comédon.
In this land there is a kind of ecstasy derived from poverty and desperation that compels people to seek consolation and fulfilment in a pathological mysticism. With their eyes fixed resolutely on a future in a happier world, mighty throngs of people travel the countryside crucifying themselves in imitation of Christ, giving rise to tremulous orgies of religious awe in those who are spectators. In Comédon the crucifiers had arrived the day before the crusaders, and numerous hopeful saints were already perched on the top of telegraph poles in the hope of having food passed up to them by the faithful, in this way repeating the admirable ploy of Simon Stylites. Outside the village, twenty cadaverous men were flogged until blood sprang from their flesh, and were subsequently roped to crosses that they themselves had dragged across the countryside for miles. As they hung there, intoxicated by their hallucinatory flirtation with death and experiencing nightmarish visions induced by the heat and the impossibility of breathing, their fellows down below thrashed each other with exultantly rolling eyes whilst the villagers crossed themselves, prayed, wept, howled, and thrilled with that terrible voyeurism occasioned by vicarious agonies.
When the crusade arrived and happened upon these masochistic bacchanalia, it stopped dead in its tracks with unanimous astonishment. This amazement was swiftly followed by a
n anger caused by having been completely pre-empted and out-performed; no villagers streamed to witness their procession, no one came out bearing tables to load with food, or knelt before the Monsignor to kiss his ring because they thought that he must be a cardinal. Instead the villagers turned their heads briefly to assess them as a minor distraction, and then turned back once more to watch the bodies groaning on the crosses and the flagellants drawing scarlet rivulets of blood from each other with bullwhips and flails.
Rechin Anquilar determined that the crucifiers were taking upon themselves the sins of the world in order to atone for them, so that the sufferings of others would be mitigated on the Dreadful Day. He determined that this was heretical since Christ had already performed this function by His own Passion, and he perceived a revolting blasphemy in what he saw. He brought everyone’s attention to his own crusade by ordering his men to substitute nails for the ropes that attached the crucifiers to their crosses. The flagellants below, believing that at last the Day of Wrath was upon them, yielded themselves joyously to the bullets and machetes of the bodyguard.
The Angelic Doctor, revolving in his mind the many words that he had written on the essence of law, reflected ruefully on the many ways in which such dreadful practise could be derived from the pristine light of his own reasonable deductions. He surveyed the carnage and wished that no word of his had ever immortalised itself on parchment; ‘Perhaps my habit of dictating to four secretaries at once militated against clarity of thought,’ he mused.
45 Don Emmanuel’s Patriotic Concert
THE BRITISH AMBASSADOR had, in the capable care of Aurelio, vomited up what remained in his stomach of the overproof aguardiente. His wellington boots had been emptied of urine, and he had been given a deep draught of a tincture that would restore him to something resembling a normal state of consciousness, if one discounted the rainbow-coloured lights at the periphery of his vision. He was carried in a chair to the site of Don Emmanuel’s musical extravaganza, but had to stand for the first song, which Don Emmanuel proclaimed to be the national anthem of Great Britain. He lurched to his feet and leant heavily upon the General for support.