The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (30 page)

HIS EMINENCE LOOKED
at the desk in his room and saw that it had become a rotten coffin through whose distorted boards there sprouted verminous cascades of ancient hair that waved like the tentacles of an anemone. There was no doubt that the grey wisps were growing apace and were winding about the furniture. A hank of it curled about his ankle and began to constrict it like a boa. He shouted, pulling his leg away, but the force reduced the casket to dust, and on the floor where his desk had been, there was now a cadaver watching him. The skin was shrunk over the bones like an Indian mummy, the hair was growing with the speed of a stream, and the amber teeth of the mouth smiled at him with contemptuous inanity.

As sweat poured down his face and a wild panic siezed his heart, a small black snake slithered out of the mouth, flicked like a tongue that removes sauce from the lips at the end of a meal, and withdrew inside with a repulsively slow sinuosity.

Shielding his eyes with his forearm somehow did not prevent him from seeing that the corpse was watching him. Shrieking at the top of his lungs did not shield him from the accusing curiosity of those bloodshot orbs with their black pinprick pupils.

There was a dry crack as the jaws unseized themselves and spoke. It was a harsh voice, more of wind and water than of flesh: ‘Look.’

Cardinal Guzman, shaking in all his body, raised his tearfilled eyes and looked. It seemed that his study had melted away to nothingness, and all the world was smoke. With his right hand clutching his throat and his left groping for something to lean against while he retched against the fumes, he reeled about the room searching for a doorway back to reality. But there was nothing beneath his feet but baked earth and sandy dust, and there was no air to breathe. He tripped over something soft and yielding, fell forward over it, and sprawled. He stood up slowly, staring at his hands that seemed to seep blood, and realised that he had just embraced a young woman who had been hacked and carved with a machete. How pretty was her face! Behind
the grime and the caked blood he could see full lips, delicate teeth, and black eyebrows that arched like those of an Arabian beauty. But her throat was slashed and bubbling with her last breaths, and she was holding out a book to him. He took it, and she sank back to die. He looked at the book and knew without examining it that it was a missal, its dark cover embossed with a cross, its pages rimmed with gold leaf. The smoke cleared with a change of breeze, and he was in a ring of brushwood huts, all of them aflame. Somewhere in the distance there were the gleeful shouts of the perpetrators of carnage, and the abject pleas of victims on their knees. He turned to run, but came up against what was the wall, invisible to him in the turbulent ordeal of his nightmare.

He staggered back, his hand to his forehead, and the Executioner came towards him. He saw the black hood with its glittering slits. His throat shrank at the sight of the colossal Negro whose naked torso was a knot of deep bronze muscle and proud sinew. He groped backwards, his hand once more seeking something to lean against, something with which to defend himself, but the Executioner stepped forward slowly, removing the sackcloth cover of the silver machete. ‘Pay me,’ said the Executioner, extending his left hand, ‘according to the custom.’

The Cardinal looked down at the pink palm of that huge black hand, and noticed the craftsman’s delicately precise fingers, the fingers of a potter or a carpenter. He looked at the thick gold bracelet on the wrist that bulged with purple veins, and he looked up at the eyes behind the hood. What did the eyes mean? Was there not a message in them? Surely the gaze of eyes was meant to convey some information? But the hood gave away nothing but impassive and final judgement, and the eyes were nothing more accessible than distant stars. ‘Pay me,’ repeated the Executioner.

‘I have nothing,’ said the Cardinal, his voice breaking into fragments and cutting his throat like shards of glass.

‘Then give me your child,’ said the Executioner, raising the silver blade high above his head, and spreading his legs for the strike.

Backing away, His Eminence felt the record player behind him, and was inspired in his mortal terror to try the one thing that always worked to drive away his demons. Sobbing with haste and desperation, his hands shaking and perspiring, he opened the lid of the
player to fill the world with Beethoven, and there, revolving on the turntable, was the Obscene Ass, leering and gibbering. It cocked its head to look up at him, squawked with jubilation, removed the glistening glans of its penis from its mouth, wove it instantaneously and incomprehensibly into a lariat, and looped it about the Cardinal’s neck.

His Eminence jerked back, but was drawn forward. His feet slipped beneath him, but still he was pulled, the demon working hand over hand to bring him in like a boat brought to harbour. He felt the soft muscular mass of the penis writhing and gripping, squirming and tightening, and his shrieks drowned in his throat as inexorably he found himself coming face to face with the Obscene Ass. Enveloped and enclosed in the foul breath of sulphur and pitch, his eyes closed tightly and his head turned away as far as could be reached. His Eminence lost the power to struggle. Tears coursed down his face with all the abandonment and desolation of utter defeat.

‘Poor ’ickle boy,’ gloated the Ass, ‘kissy, kissy,’ and the repellent creature inserted its tongue deep into the Cardinal’s mouth. He felt that prehensile organ writhe and search in his gullet; he felt it dip and dive, roll lasciviously about his own tongue and cheeks, and felt his mouth engorge with the sticky saliva that tasted of shit and sarsaparilla. Vomit rose from his stomach and added its bitter burning to the nausea that had overwhelmed him. The Obscene Ass pushed him away and greedily swallowed the vomit in heaving gulps.

He fell back into the strong and patient arms of the Executioner. It was with gladness and sobs of relief that he felt the long silver blade draw slowly across his throat.

Cristobal came into the room dragging a tattered toy dog on wheels that played the xylophone as it moved. He let go of the string and stooped over the recumbent body of the Cardinal. He put his lips very close to the man’s ear and said, ‘Boo.’

Cardinal Guzman stirred, groaned piteously, and tried to rise up from the floor. A string of adhesive saliva seemed to attach him to it, and he tried to wipe it away with the sleeve of his cassock. ‘You’ve been sick,’ observed Cristobal matter-of-factly. ‘Shall I fetch Mama?’

He looked up at his small son standing there with an expression of
innocent concern upon his face, and Cristobal added, ‘Why have you been crying?’

‘I had a terrible dream, Cristobal,’ replied the Cardinal, sitting up and wiping his eyes with his fingers. ‘It was the worst dream I ever had.’

‘But you weren’t asleep. You hadn’t gone to bed. My worst dream is that Mama leaves me in the market place and I get lost.’

‘You poor boy,’ said the Cardinal, stroking Cristobal’s tight mulatto curls. ‘I had my dream when I was awake because I am not very well.’

‘Is that why you threw everything around, Papa?’ asked the little boy, sweeping his hand grandly to indicate the broken furniture, the sheaves of strewn paper, and the record player that was lying on its side on the floor with the lid open.

‘Promise you won’t tell Mama. I’ll get into big trouble if she finds out about all the mess. Why did you call me “Papa”?’

Cristobal smiled at his own cleverness. ‘Because I am allowed to call you “Father” and that means the same as “Papa”, doesn’t it?’

A residual tang of bilious nausea glowed caustically in the Cardinal’s throat, and instinctively he went to open the window. He took a deep breath and was assaulted by the poisonous stench of the river. He recoiled and shook his head.

‘Mama told me that two countries went to war once because of a football match,’ said Cristobal, searching through the day’s events to find something that might prolong the conversation past his bedtime.

‘People always go to war over stupid things,’ replied his father. ‘Do you want to sit on my knee?’

‘You smell of sick, though,’ complained the boy, wrinkling up his nose. ‘I’ll sit on your knee if you let me play with your cross. It’s nice and shiny and it’s heavy, and it’s better than wood, and anyway, football isn’t stupid.’

‘Yes it is,’ said the Cardinal, taking the Christus Rex from about his neck, and handing it over.

‘Isn’t,’ said Cristobal with conviction, settling onto his father’s lap, and ferreting inside his nose for any tender morsel that he might have missed during one of his previous excavations.

His Eminence watched Cristobal disapprovingly inspecting the
disappointing harvest on the end of his finger, and felt a flood of affection cascade into his heart. ‘I love you, Cristobal,’ he said simply.

The little boy bounced in his father’s lap, put his arms around his neck and kissed him wetly on the cheek. ‘I love you too,’ he replied, and then, ‘if your tummy gets any bigger I won’t have room on your lap anymore, will I? Mama says that you must have something growing in there. When I kiss you it feels all stubbly.’

His Eminence smiled, ‘It’s one of the prices you pay for becoming a man.’

‘Getting fat?’

‘No, silly, getting stubbly. And this isn’t fat, it’s a hurt.’

‘Are you going to die?’

The directness of the question momentarily stunned the cleric, and forced him suddenly to contemplate a real possibility. Cristobal watched his face and continued, ‘You’re not allowed to die.’

Cardinal Guzman shook his head as though with pity, and squeezed Cristobal so tightly that the hug made his small son pull a face.

The creature in his lap squirmed and he looked down. But instead of seeing the beloved but forbidden fruit of his loins, he beheld the Obscene Ass wriggling there, with its coarsehaired ears, its enormous self-willed pudenda, its loathsome slavering tongue. It sneered up at the Cardinal, and in perfectly mocking mimicry of Cristobal’s reedy voice, said, ‘Give me another kiss, Papa.’

Appalled and outraged, the Cardinal stood up so suddenly that the beast fell to the floor. Summoning courage and intent from deep within his disgust, he picked up the monster, grasped it tightly despite its howls, and flung it out of the open window. As he did so he felt a painful tugging on his finger, and when he looked at his hand he saw that his ring of office had somehow been thrown out with the demon.

Cristobal hurtled through the air in what seemed to him to be an eternity of incomprehension and disbelief. He smacked into the turbid waters of the river with a blow that emptied his chest of air, and the gasp that wrenched his body drew in not air but the rank and slimy putrefaction of the waters, thick with the decay of the vanished children of the sewers. He drifted down ever more slowly, amazed and drowsy with the reverie of his gathering death, and briefly he brushed the hands that floated upward like weed, caressing him, and
seeming forever to be reaching for the light, before he was taken up and carried away on the endless journey to the anonymous sea, still clutching in his hand the silver Christus Rex and his beloved protector’s ring.

Cardinal Guzman turned away from the window, still gazing at the place where his ring once used to be, and beheld the Obscene Ass laughing at him from the armchair. He turned to the window, yelled, ‘Cristobal, Cristobal!’ took his head in his hands, and groaned as if all the grief of the world were his. He thought of diving after his son in the attempt to save him; but rationality asserted itself, and the thought struck him all at once that he had no way of knowing what had really happened. Perhaps he really had just ejected a demon that had simply re-entered. Perhaps all along the demon had been playing at being Cristobal. He went out into the barren stone of the corridors to search for him.

He went to the boy’s room and found the bed empty. Cheerful toys in jaunty colours were scattered in disarray about the floor, and on the wall was the picture of Our Lord with his Bleeding Heart, competing for attention with pictures of football stars that Concepcion had indulgently cut from magazines. His pace quickening, Cardinal Guzman searched through the palace in all of the boy’s favourite hideyholes and crannies, the same places that he could always be found during games of hide-and-seek. He went out into the courtyard where Cristobal liked to watch the hummingbirds and imitate them, his arms flurrying as he ran about exclaiming, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’

With a dreadful certainty rising in his breast, the Cardinal ran back to his study, placed a chair against the window, and looked down into the waters of the river. He saw nothing but the broken reflection of the reddened moon and of the sodium streetlamps. He stepped back down, mopped the sweat from his brow, and caught sight of the small toy dog with which his son had entered.

Stupefied, numbed by self-hatred and contempt, desperate with remorse, he burst out of the room and ran for Concepcion’s chamber. He threw open the door and flung himself to his knees. Caught in the middle of folding a dress and putting it in a drawer, she stood dismayed at this apparition of agony and repentance. With tears
following each other down his cheeks, his voice breaking, he held up a quivering hand and looked at her imploringly.

‘Christ have mercy on us,’ he said. ‘I think I have murdered Cristobal.’

A shaft of excruciating pain wrenched in his gut, he drew a sharp breath, toppled forward on his face, and lay still.

‘It is given to no human being to stereotype a set of truths, and walk safely by their guidance with his mind’s eye closed.’

John Stuart
Mill

HIS EXCELLENCY PRESIDENT
Veracruz skimmed through the dispatches forwarded from the Embassy, and felt himself notably free of homesickness. There had been an assassination attempt upon General Hernando Montes Sosa, which was being kept secret until the various branches of the internal security services had decided who had perepetrated it. The Service of State Information thought that it was the Communists, the Army Internal Security Service claimed that it was an admiral who wanted to be Chief-of-Staff in the victim’s place, the Naval Internal Intelligence Agency said that it was a commodore from the Air Force, the Air Force Internal Security Agency thought that it was a disaffected army general, the Chief of Federal Police was convinced that it was a right-wing plot to blame the Communists and thus cause a backlash to their own benefit, the Chief of Provincial Police thought it had been done by a mere seeker of notoriety, the Chief of the National Gendarmerie believed that it was done by a lunatic, the Chief of City Police thought that it was the work of the CIA, the Foreign Ministry believed that it was part of an international conspiracy by MOSSAD, the Interior Ministry Internal Security Office thought that it was the KGB, the Ministry of Labour Surveillance Directorate blamed the Paraguayans because the General had clamped down on sources of cocaine coming in from that country, and the State Oil Company Industrial Security Operative had arrived at the conclusion that it was part of a wider plot by Muslim extremists and Mormons who wished to legalise polygamy. His Excellence noted that General Sosa was alive and well, and filed all the reports in the rubbish bin, his own opinion being that it was the work of the coca cartels. It was with greater interest that he read a letter from the French Ambassador, recommending spanking as an aphrodisiac, since it caused vasodilation in the appropriate regions of the body in both sexes; His Excellency pondered upon this, and then recollected that it had been he himself who had originally advocated this practise to the French Ambassador. He turned to a letter from the Finance Minister,
Emperador Ignacio Coriolano, saying that the National Debt was now at precisely the staggering figure that it had been at the end of Dr Badajoz’ ‘economic miracle’. Emperador stated that he was working with Foreign Secretary Lopez Garcilaso in the attempt to obtain fiscal advice from the Archangel Gabriel, and that the further missions to establish the whereabouts of El Dorado had discovered a cache of rusty muskets in a cave where they had been deposited in 1752 during an abortive rebellion. They had been sold to a Yanqui museum, and had raised half a million dollars which had somehow disappeared inside the international banking system. Emperador added, on a personal note, that he had bought a small aeroplane and was learning to fly.