The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (2 page)

Skilled as he was in the redaction of his horrifying visions, His Eminence remembered as if by reflex the machinations in which he had involved himself in order to close down the village schools.

It was not that he was opposed to true education, where one
learned the catechism by heart, the multiplication tables, the lives of the saints and national heroes, the basics of literacy, and the story and meaning of the Passion of Christ. To these he was not opposed at all. What he opposed was the brainwashing of the poor by thin and virtually secular missionaries who were poisoned by the insidious ideas of Paulo Freire, who prattled about ‘liberating the illiterate masses from their culture of silence’, preaching ‘struggle’ and ‘participation in the historical process’. His Eminence could concede the good intentions of such idealists, but how could he tolerate the idea of the nation’s young growing up without an education that would arrange in advance an eternal place at God’s Right Hand in Heaven?

These pitiful youngsters with such an ‘education’ would surely be condemned forever to the limbo of the heathen, or the purifying flames of purgatory, or perhaps the everlasting torture of hell, tormented by demons such as these very demons, except that the demons of hell were even worse. Why did he feel guilty, when his reason told him that he would be saving them from spending eternity on fire without being consumed, with tridents twisting in their entrails? Why worry about it when they would have been saved by him personally from being violated everlastingly by the twin organs of Lucifer, one up their backside and one up their vagina (if they were women, that is, which they mostly were, since women were the greatest tempters after Satan himself)? Did those defenders of the underprivileged understand that the Devil’s two penises were toweringly huge, rougher than corn husks, and ejaculated semen burningly cold in such quantities that the condemned split repeatedly apart before being miraculously mended in order to be dually raped all over again? And yet His Eminence felt dejected about all those schoolhouses that were now pig-sheds and brothels, as well as about the careers of all the priests he had blighted, and also about the time when he had won promotion by falsely declaring in the relevant ears that his main rival for the post was homosexual.

And here was the demon he knew as the Concealer, who was a furtive character indeed. He was praising the Cardinal with a sarcasm and irony so adept that all the demons were squealing with swinish and delighted laughter. ‘He is honest,’ said the Concealer, raising one finger in the air, so that His Eminence was reminded of the time when he had sold the cloisters of a cathedral to a supermarket chain,
and had kept half the money for himself. ‘He is chaste,’ proclaimed the Concealer, and he burned with the shame of having impregnated Concepcion, his kitchen maid. He was reminded that once he had gone to a brothel in disguise, but the whore had recognised him and he had been obliged to have her killed, and then the killer had tried to blackmail him, and so he too now lay in unhallowed ground where his soul cried continually for light and for revenge in the crepuscular world of the Cardinal’s nightmares.

‘He honours his mother and father,’ said the Concealer, grinning whilst the demons sniggered and pointed, and the cleric recalled how he had left his own mother to die a lunatic in the filth of an asylum rather than house her in the palace and thereby let it be known from her appearance that he had Indian blood in his veins.

‘He loves his neighbour, he is full of compassion,’ smirked the Concealer, so that the vision of a ghastly mistake returned to him once more. It had been in the time of the disappearances, which he had not believed to be truly occurring, thinking the stories to be the propaganda of subversives. He had given away to the Army the hiding place in the sanctuary of a Marxist priest, and had had to look on in horror as they had filled him up with bullets and carried him away in the St John’s Day altarcloth, which he had later received back, freshly laundered, but dark with perpetual and reproachful stains.

And the whole congregation of these skeletal monsters, the Smiters, the Flaming ones, the Litigators, the Dispersers, the Falsifiers, danced around him as he lay upon the flags, panting and groaning. He gazed up at those leering eyes with their sepulchral squints, their skin like that of corpses, stretched tightly over the sharp angles of their bones (reminding him, forgive him the blasphemy, of the dried body of a saint), their copious genitals flapping and waving with a rustling like vultures’ wings, and he turned over on his back, still cradling the terrible pain in his entrails.

He closed his eyes and concentrated. ‘
Domine Deus
,’ he began, his voice cracking with grief. ‘
Agnus Dei, Filius Patris, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis; Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostrum, Qui sedes ad dexteram patris, miserere nobis.
’ With peace descending upon him he added, ‘
Kyrie, Eleison. Christe, Eleison
,’ and then he confessed to Almighty God, Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, Blessed
Michael the Archangel, Blessed John the Baptist, to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints, that he had sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed. He struck his chest in penitence, as at mass, and the twittering demons faded from the room at the same time as the appalling pain in his guts diminished to the remains of a suggestive throb.

Concepcion came into the lectorium and found him struggling to get to his feet. ‘The pain again?’ she enquired. ‘You must take yourself to a doctor, my cadenay.’

‘I accept it as a just punishment,’ he said, looking up at her through the tears of his terrible affliction.

Concepcion was a mulatta, his kitchen maid, with one child of his to her credit, and in truth he loved her in her carnality more even than he loved the Virgin in her sexless spirituality. She put her arms around him to give him comfort, and, later in the night when she had slipped into his chamber, she solaced him with the musky familiarity of her nakedness.

But when he got up at three o’clock in the morning to go to relieve his bladder he could not resume his sleep because the cohort of the devils was back again, parading around the room, swinging from the lightpull and the tapestries sown by widows that depicted the Stations of the Cross.

Worst of all, the Obscene Ass was there, with his donkey’s head and his donkey’s member which one minute was so erect that it bounced along the ceiling leaving a trail of glistening fluid, and the next was trailing flaccidly along the floor like some praeternatural gastropod from a cheap horror movie.

His Eminence left the bed and rushed in a frenzy to the chapel, where he kissed the altar and fell upon his knees whilst the demons cavorted and gibbered even upon the Christus Rex that reigned upon the wall. ‘
Munda cor meum
,’ he prayed, ‘
ac labia mea, omnipotens Deus, Qui labia Isaiae prophetae calculo mundasti ignito
 . . .’ And they shrieked and turned their backsides to him, farting sulphurously and contemptuously before disappearing amid a chorus of ‘
Diabolus tecum, diabolus tecum
’.

After their gales of ribald laughter had faded into the furthest corners of the palace, His Eminence prayed for a very long time and, finally, by way of atonement, promised faithfully with his hand upon
the reliquary that he would without fail use his office well to bring the light of the truth of the Church to the entire nation. He would send out the Dominicans to detect errors and defeat them with the aid of the copious logic of Saints Anselm and Aquinas, to evangelise the heathen, to save his own tainted soul by ensuring that before he died a million other souls would have been pointed heavenward with all the foolproof precision of a gringo missile.

SOMETIMES IGNORANCE CAN
be most beneficial; were it not for my ignorance I would have nothing of what I have today, which in fact is considerably more than I ever could have expected, and is also considerably more than I deserve.

In the first place, nothing of all this could have occurred if I had been a native of this country, rather than what I was, which was an itinerant and not very successful musicologist, specialising in folk-tunes of the Andes, which I used to collect and publish in anthologies. I think that the only people who bought them were probably superannuated Western hippies who formed groups, all dressed in ponchos and sombreros, which played in the student unions of West Coast universities and could not even pronounce a proper Castilian ‘o’ on the ends of words.

I was travelling in this country looking for charango tunes that used the pentatonic mode, when I passed by a church in Ipasueño, where there was being held the funeral of a policeman. Out of curiosity I went and stood by the door, which is how I first heard the ‘Requiem Angelico’, which is now so famous that there is no need for me to describe it. It was being played by a small group of musicians playing mandolas, quenas, and the harmonium, and even in that form it moved the whole congregation to tears, myself not excepted.

Assuming that the piece was traditional, I wrote it down immediately in my manuscript notebook with a feeling of the greatest excitement imaginable. As I travelled on through the sierras it fermented continuously in my mind, until one morning I awoke with an arrangement of it for string quartet almost wholly formed in my imagination. I wrote it down in a great hurry before it slipped away, and when I reached the capital I lost no time in posting it to my publisher in Mexico City.

All the rest is history. The success it enjoyed there caused it to spread into the United States, whence it spread to France and the rest of Europe, where it became the theme of a Rumanian film that
won at the Cannes Film Festival, probably only because of the music. The consequence of all this was that I became immensely wealthy because of the royalties, and you can easily imagine my alarm and distress when it transpired that the music was not traditional at all, but had been composed by the famous Dionisio Vivo of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. There was a spectacular panic in the legal department of my publisher, and eventually I travelled all the way to Cochadebajo de los Gatos with the company lawyer in order to sort out any problems before they arose.

It was an horrifically arduous journey, taking four days through the sierras on muleback, and when we arrived at that extraordinary city populated entirely by eccentrics, it seemed at first that it had been a wasted journey. This was because Sr. Vivo himself had been quite unaware that his melody, and he himself also, were famous all over the world. He seemed to be very surprised, and had nothing more to say upon the subject than that we sould simply divide the proceeds half/half, since although he had composed the tune, I had made the arrangement. When he showed me his own arrangement I was astonished to find that it was in any case remarkably similar to my own, except of course that it was scored for different instruments. My lawyer jumped at the chance to come to so amicable an agreement, and Sr. Vivo even said that he did not mind if it was not retrospective, which meant that I could keep all the royalties that I had thencefar earned.

Having spent some days in that wonderful city with its proliferation of tame black jaguars, its Inca buildings, and its population who practise the most enlightened and congenial religion I have ever come across, I fell ardently in love with the place and resolved to stay there despite its isolation from the rest of the world.

I chose a small house on the edge of the city, and dug out the alluvial mud with the help of several cheerful characters who said that they came originally from Chiriguana, a settlement that was destroyed in a flood some years before.

It was an ideal place for me, because I wanted fresh mountain air, space, privacy, a place where one could palpably feel the presence of ancient gods and the spirits of nature. But also it was a place where, when in the appropriate mood, one could find spectacular revelry and good humour.

The house was merely an empty shell, but I chose it because it was on the sunny side of the valley, high enough to have a good view over the town, with a sufficient breeze to diminish the occasionally stupefying heat. It took me a good year to make the place inhabitable.

The first thing that I did was to dig out the well at the side of the house, which had caved in on itself and was full of mud and rocks. I was helped in this by a Frenchman named Antoine, a man of considerable culture who had chosen to live here because he was attached to the people, with whom he had arrived in the original immigration. Like most Frenchmen, he was extremely fond of philosophising about women, and was married to someone called Françoise, who had apparently been cured of a foul cancer by indigenous methods.

It took us two months to dig out the well and rebuild its walls, and at the bottom I found the skull of a baby, which I assume to have been left there as a sacrifice in times past. I keep this tiny skull on my bookshelf as my own Renaissance-style memento mori, and I frequently speculate as to the nature of the story of its tragedy. There was fortunately still water at the bottom of the well, and I remember that when I remarked to Antoine that it was strange that water should flow beneath the side of a mountain, he observed, ‘I can think of many stranger things.’

We repaired the walls and roof of the house, and painted the rooms completely white so that they became suddenly clean, bright, and spacious. Antoine and I managed, at some danger to ourselves (I feel in retrospect), to install electricity by connecting up a cable to the faltering system invented by a teacher. This man was Profesor Luis, who had set up a row of windmills to generate power; this was perfectly adequate for lighting, but was somewhat feeble when high amperage was required, so that the electric cooker that I had flown in by helicopter turned out to be of more use as a storage cupboard.

It often happens when setting up a house that one finds quite suddenly that there is an urgent need for some item overlooked during the last expedition. The track down from my house was a deeply pitted one that served as a watercourse each time that it rained, and although I have stabilised it since, it was to begin with only negotiable on foot or by mule, or by Antoine’s ancient three-wheeled tractor. This tractor had been half-buried in the mud of the
flood at Chiriguana, but Sr. Vivo’s father, who is in fact General Hernando Montes Sosa, governor of Cesar, had it dug out and brought in slung under a vast helicopter gun ship, at his son’s request. It is commonly said in this country that General Sosa is the only member of the military hierarchy who ever does anything useful.