The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (34 page)

Father Lorenzo summoned up his courage and looked up at the zealous eyes of his leader. ‘I and my fellows did not embark on this enterprise in order to increase the sum of human misery, we came to bring our fellow men to the knowledge of happiness in Christ, and –’

‘We are talking about eternal bliss, not the little joys and sorrows of our temporal state, Father, remember that. Now I am afraid that I have plans to make.’ He spurred his horse forward, leaving the company of the disillusioned to raise their hands in gestures of despair, shake their heads, and ask each other, ‘What now?’

‘We should go to the Cardinal,’ announced Lorenzo. ‘He would put a stop to all this if he knew.’

‘I have heard that he is very sick and all but mad,’ said another. ‘I know someone who works in the palace.’

‘In that case,’ replied the priest, ‘I shall go to the Monsignor and tell him that my conscience obliges me to return to the capital and inform the police of all that I have witnessed.’

It was the most courageous thing that Father Lorenzo ever did, and also the last. The Monsignor was in no mood to have his celestial mission thwarted by the secular authorities, and with righteous anger he deputed one of his bodyguard to cause the troublesome priest to vanish off the face of the earth and reappear two metres beneath it. This was the first of his many judicial executions, and thereafter they became ever easier and more frequent.

It was not long before everybody knew what had happened to Father Lorenzo, and the softhearted disappeared en masse, returning to their parishes to write urgent letters to the authorities. These letters were read with concern or disbelief, filed, and forgotten whilst more immediate administrative problems were attended to, and it
was not until Dionisio Vivo himself exerted his considerable influence that anything was done at all.

In the meantime El Inocente found himself beset by new problems caused by the left-wing faction in the body of men to which he had become accustomed to refer as ‘my army’.

The Church, like most of those in Latin America, found itself divided neatly across the middle. There was the hierarchy, consisting of the ultra-conservative sons of the oligarchy, who promoted each other assiduously and controlled the allocation and use of resources, and there was the main body of the general priesthood. There had been a time when this latter was employed and paid mostly by the rich landlords (the latifundistas), and their mission on earth had been to counsel the poor to put up with their ordained lot and await their reward in heaven.

But ever since the Council of Medellin a great change had taken place, and nowadays the general priesthood overwhelmingly believed that to love one’s neighbour includes helping him and taking his side in the face of injustice and exploitation. Some priests, such as Camilo Torres, even went so far as to take up arms and join the Communist guerrilleros in their hopeless ‘focos’ in the countryside, and many others found themselves able to read and agree with almost everything they read in
Fidel y La Religión
, a book by Frei Betto which, owing to the solitude of that continent, sold millions in Latin America and was ignored everywhere else. The radical priests and nuns who were so susceptible to this book considered themselves to be the new voice crying in the wilderness, preparing for the second coming of the Lord in the form of socialism, and they did not find themselves seeing eye to eye with Mgr Rechin Anquilar. This latter had his gaze fixed upon the next world, and was principally interested in cramming as full as possible the kingdom of paradise, whereas the former were chiliasts who looked forward to the kingdom of heaven on earth, and conceived of Christ as somewhat resembling Fidel Castro in demeanour, but with the soft and gentle eyes of Che Guevara.

These formidable idealists had their heads full of schemes of redistributing the wealth of the rich to the poor, which, if scrupulously carried out, would in sorry fact have given to each pauper enough money to buy three avocados per annum. They also wished to redivide the land, an experiment that once in Peru had caused the
complete collapse of the rural economy, since the peasants had immediately reverted to unmechanised subsistence farming. Most importantly, these people had their eyes open and their ears perpetually pricked in the hope of hearing some new story that illustrated the oppression of the masses, and those involved in the crusade very soon found such dramas enacted aplenty before their very eyes. Such people act as the conscience of a nation, and they generally do not achieve power because they are pre-empted by concessions from those in authority, obliging them to look for something else about which to be outraged. But on this occasion no amount of protest seemed to awaken a spark of liberalism in the heart of Monsignor Rechin Anquilar.

The Monsignor found himself plagued by committees and delegations forming up outside his quarters every evening, pushing into his hands lengthy petitions and complaints signed by every one of their number. There were detailed eyewitness accounts of abuses and atrocities. He received elaborate and outspoken lectures from doughty nuns wearing battledress and enormous revolvers. He would gaze at them in angry silence, experiencing all the disdainful contempt that the autocrat feels naturally for conspiratorial gadflies, and would find amazement and disgust doing battle within himself at the mere idea that they had ever been accepted into the Church in the first place.

One day he summoned all of the radical clergy, and was obliged to wait whilst they held a vote amongst themselves as to whether or not they would go and see him. This was a lengthy process, since they had adopted the custom that all their votes should be unanimous, and therefore they would take many hours to arrive at a motion to which everybody could assent. Additionally, like all people who enjoy addressing each other as ‘comrade’, they were violently addicted to clauses, composites, sub-clauses, points of order, wordings of paragraphs, procedural formalities, and amendments of amendments.

After the discussion had raged for two days, Mgr Rechin Anquilar ordered his followers to strike camp, and when the exhausted committee emerged from their tent to go to see him in order to inform him that they had decided democratically not to go and see him, they discovered that there was no one left to go and see. They returned to their tent, and there they had another lengthy discussion about what to do next; but it took such a long time to arrive at a formula for a
resolution upon which to vote in such a way that the outcome would be unanimous, that, once they had decided to rejoin the crusade, they had no prospect of finding it, since it was not clear where it had gone. Thus they returned to their clinics and their adult education projects in the slums, and the last chance was lost to save the crusade from becoming a plague. From that point forward, the only clerics left in the expedition were either fanatics or Holy Fools.

‘EL GRAN AZORAMIENTO’
(The Great Embarrassment) happened not least on account of an importunate plague of pigs. Periodically it occurred that migrant swarms of these small black creatures with their Indian files of jaunty little piglets would move from adjacent valleys in search of succulent novelties, and the city of Cochadebajo de los Gatos would awake to find itself occupied by a scavenging army. The pigs would root through refuse, shamelessly raid kitchens and foodstores, flirt outrageously with their domestic cousins who were twice their size, and unearth whole crops of potatoes from the andenes. A paroxysm of exasperation would seize the people and they would issue forth armed with sticks and guns to drive the creatures away.

But the pigs were evasive and cunning; when one attempted to kick them, they skipped adroitly sideways, and one would fall over. They left rank little piles in just those places where one was most likely to slip on them, and they most disgustingly displayed a predilection for consuming dogshit with an expression of extreme rapture on their shiny faces. One of them had most memorably once eaten a man’s finger that had been severed by a machete.

Even the great cats of the city seemed to be confused by them; the cats had grown luxurious and idle, and were unable to select which one to pounce upon when there were so many from which to choose. Instead they swiped at them in passing or retired to the rooftops in search of peace, where no pigs could disconcert them by darting unexpectedly between their paws.

Hectoro would organise bloody massacres which involved all the men of the city, and most of the Spanish soldiers revived by Aurelio would take part, bloodlust being with them an even more powerful motive than desire. For days afterwards the aroma of roasting pork would drench the pajonales and pun as of the sierra, and an invasion of buzzards and vultures would disgust the people more even than the original outbreak of swine.

The first time that this happened there was a terrible pestilence of trichinosis and hookworm shortly afterwards. Profesor Luis was kept busy for days injecting formalin into the runnels that crisscrossed the bodies of the unfortunate, and Aurelio was obliged to travel back and forth to the jungle in order to collect poisons and cibil that would kill the parasites from within. Everybody had to endure the inconvenience of wearing shoes and the nausea caused by Aurelio’s medicines, which made one’s urine stink of corpses, and thereafter everybody followed Profesor Luis’ new addition to the constitution which stated that ‘No pork shall be cooked on the bone, and it shall be cooked until it is nearly falling to pieces. It is also forbidden to attempt to cure parasites by the hitherto traditional method which only makes them worse; that is, by forcing children to eat the excrement of dogs.’

In the Andes each season of the year is reprised every day. When General Hernando Montes Sosa arrived in a helicopter with Mama Julia and the British Ambassador at precisely ten hundred hours on June the sixth, it was just turning from spring to summer, and the town was in a frenzy of despair because its elaborate preparations had been wrecked by a sudden influx of pigs. From the air it seemed to the General that down below there had been a catastrophic attack of St Vitus’ dance, and from lower down he perceived that everybody was rushing this way and that in the attempt to catch what looked like particularly nimble small black dogs. When he dismounted from the helicopter he understood from the stench, from the squelch beneath his boot, and from the evidence of his eyes, that there had been a mass intrusion of wild pigs. Mama Julia glared balefully out of the door of the craft, and refused to come out. The British Ambassador exchanged his brogues for green wellington boots, and appraised the scene as being very similar to a prep school sports day or the opening of Harrods’ sale.

Dionisio and the formal party of welcome were not only shy, but were crimson about the ears for the shame of what their visitors must have thought of the town. All were deeply conscious of the importance of the Ambassador, but most were entirely ignorant of the necessary etiquette. Dionisio shook his hand, and Sergio curtsied. Hectoro took the puro from his mouth, spat on the ground in a manner intended to be respectful, and said, ‘Hola, cabrón, what do you want to see first, the Temple of Viracocha or the whorehouse?’
Misael doffed his sombrero, grinning dumbly from ear to ear. Don Emmanuel, who had laid special plans for the day, put on a perfect caricature of a public school accent, and said, ‘What ho, old bean, frightfully spiffing to meet you.’

The British Ambassador raised an eyebrow and very coolly replied, ‘Bertie Wooster, I presume,’ whereupon Don Emmanuel bowed deeply, swept his hat from his head, and thus revealed the balding patch upon which Felicidad had painstakingly written at his instruction ‘God Bless The Queen And All Who Sail In Her’.

The Ambassador raised the other eyebrow and twisted his lip sardonically. ‘I wish you a speedy recovery,’ he said, and passed on to shake the hand of the Mexican musicologist, who introduced him ‘to my two wives, Ena and Lena’. The Ambassador looked at the smiling twins, dressed the same, and blinked hard. He shook his head as though to clear it of incomprehension, and double-checked that there were really two identical women before him who were married to the same man. His eyebrows rose to the top of his forehead once more, and he passed on to Remedios and Gloria, both dressed in khaki and armed with Kalashnikovs. ‘Welcome,’ announced Remedios, ‘but your foreign policy stinks.’

‘Gracias,’ replied the Ambassador, who understood very little Castilian as yet, and was guessing as to the correct response. ‘De nada,’ said Remedios, who had always heard that the British ruling classes were unnaturally polite.

At this point Aurelio came forward and presented each of the visitors with the customary bags of coca leaves and lejia, the lime necessary to activate them. The General frowned but took his bag out of courtesy, as did the Ambassador, and Mama Julia, who had by now summoned up enough courage to descend into the flurry of pigs, whispered in Dionisio’s ear, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘Round here they chew them,’ he replied, and before he could prevent her, she had popped a wad into her mouth, and was saying, ‘Mmm, is this some kind of spinach?’ Throughout the day she surreptitiously sampled further mouthfuls, with results that will be revealed below.

‘I must apologise about the chaos,’ said Dionisio. ‘We have had an
unexpected invasion of wild pigs, but we are doing our best to get rid of them.’

‘Never mind, my boy, you do your best, and we will try to ignore them,’ said the General, snapping out of the path of a young boar well-armed with sharp little tusks that Antoine the Frenchman was attempting to chase away.

The party was taken on a guided tour of the town, with Profesor Luis learnedly discoursing upon it, and Don Emmanuel translating for the benefit of the Ambassador:

Profesor Luis: This is the temple of Viracocha . . .

Don Emmanuel (translating): This is our very largest latrine, which doubles as a whorehouse in bad weather . . .

Mama Julia: I feel marvellous.