The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (44 page)

I went down on my knees and begged him. I said, ‘Father, tell me what I have to confess.’ He looked confused and fearful, which revealed to me that he was not a man like El Inocente, whose head was disconnected from his heart. He looked around to check that there was no one near, and he bent down to whisper, ‘La Perfecta.’

I had already guessed that they wanted Sibila. My heart sank to my belly, and my head dropped to my chest. I looked at the instruments of torture, and I remembered the screaming I had heard, the flaying of the mayor and the castration of Gil.

In my life I had often thought about this kind of situation, wondering what I would do. From time to time I have toyed with the idea that I would be heroic and hold out until the end. But now I made excuses to myself. I said, ‘I would be no worse than whoever it was who denounced me. What is the use of being hanged like the others?’ I asked Father Valentino, ‘What happens if I make full confession?’

‘You will be spared,’ he said. ‘There will be punishment, but you will, if you abjure, be reconciled to the faith.’

‘And Sibila? Will she be spared?’

He smiled at me indulgently and replied, ‘When she confesses her errors, she will be spared.’

It was that statement that made up my mind. I reasoned that Sibila would confess and pretend to repent, as I was about to do. I thought that she would understand my cowardice and learn to forgive me, because she would realise that in my position she would have done the same. I went back to El Inocente and told him exactly where she was.

But I was not spared in the manner I had expected. In the morning there was an auto de fe, and El Inocente appeared dressed in purple for it. There were many there who were to be sentenced, and I was the last. It was hard to recognise many of my friends because of their mistreatment, and I felt ashamed that I was unharmed. Every one of us had all our property confiscated and given over to the Holy Office. I was taken to my house and they made an inventory of all my meagre possessions, down to the last spoon. They loaded the entire wealth of the village into carts and trucks, because they had found a heresy in every single person. The people who had confessed reluctantly had their eyes put out by the bodyguard, and they were tied to Father Belibasta by a rope. His eyes were left in his head, and he was told to lead them away through the country as a warning to others.

As for me, I was penanced. I was put on a burro and flogged through the streets. The people were supposed to throw stones at me. They were ordered to do so by the bodyguard, but no stones touched me. When we returned to the front of the church, one of the bodyguard took a knife and slit my nose. I am not telling you about what I suffered, because I cannot describe it and I cannot talk about it, and I cannot reconcile myself to it. Except that now I see justice in it if I think of it as my punishment for betraying Sibila.

When I was untied from the donkey, and I had been lifted from the ground where I had fallen, I was surrounded by the priests. They put on me the sanbenito, which is the shirt with a yellow cross on the back and front, and I was told to wear it all my life. I was told to go barefoot all my days, and I was forbidden to touch anyone. They gave me a wooden palette for shopkeepers to put my purchases on.
Blood soaked into my shirt and it ran down my legs. I thought that I was going to die, and my stomach felt as though it had caved in.

The Monsignor came forward and smiled at me benignly. He asked me, ‘What faith do you embrace?’ and I replied, ‘The faith of Jesus Christ.’

He turned to the other priests and told them to rejoice. I swear there were tears of happiness in his eyes. He put his hands on my shoulders, said, ‘Thanks be to God,’ and kissed me on both cheeks.

I HAVE LIVED
here for some time now, and I never cease to be intrigued and amazed; the mania for construction seems never to abate, and this in a people naturally inclined to idleness and profligacy. The construction of the wall came about at the time when I had been down on the plateau and caught red beasts. They crawl up one’s trouser legs and burrow under the skin. Lucky is the man whose waistband is tight from prosperity or shrinkage, because then they stop and the upper body is spared. I had terrible sore spots that drove me crazy with itching, and I fell out with Ena and Lena because I thought that one of them had been unfaithful and come down with the pox. I went to Aurelio in high indignation, and he told me to block up the breathing holes with grease, and sure enough they died and I had an allergic reaction to the corpses and itched even worse. I went back to Aurelio and he said I should be grateful it was not warble fly, which reminds me that not long ago one of the horses got kicked in the eye and it went bad. Before long it was a mass of gruesomely writhing maggots and I believed the stallion would die, but Sergio removed the eyeball and cleaned out the socket with alcohol, and everything was fine except that the horse kept walking in circles for lack of vision on one side. Dionisio said, ‘Never mind,’ and he found a grey pebble and painted an eye on it with white paint. He put it in the socket and now the horse walks straight – how do you explain that? – but the eye appears most disconcerting when you see the horse like that.

Don Emmanuel bought the stallion and one day he rode up the hill on it and gave me a piece of paper, saying that it had a rare English Christmas song on it, and perhaps I would be interested in collecting it? It was very long because it increases by one line at a time for each stanza, and it is called ‘The Twelve Days Of Christmas’. I give the last verse here:

‘On the twelfth day of Christmas my truelove sent to me twelve twats a-twitching, eleven leaping lesbians, ten torn-off testicles, nine
gnawed-off nipples, eight aching arseholes, seven convicted vicars, five choirboys. Four fornicators, three French whores, two shithouse doors, and my Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.’

Don Emmanuel sang it to me most tenderly in a fine baritone, and I confess I was extremely moved, saying, ‘You should have sung it to the British Ambassador when he was here.’ I do not understand the words because of the poverty of my English, but I have sent it to my agent in Mexico along with a transcription of the melody, with the hope that it might be incorporated in a forthcoming anthology of international traditional songs whose profits will go to UNICEF. Don Emmanuel is sometimes a most embarrassing man, but this time he has come up with something very marvellous. He has had another falling-out with Felicidad, and the town has been talking of nothing else. I wish they could conduct their affairs as blissfully as Capitan Papagato and Francesca; she has fallen pregnant again and is already beginning to waddle rather than walk. Everyone is surprised because she was still breastfeeding the first. I understand that their jaguars are having more kittens. Soon we will be overrun. I have had to reinforce the roof of my house because Lena says that the weight of the cats sunbathing at noon will otherwise cause it one day to collapse.

I was putting the finishing touches to the new beams and humming a tune that Dionisio taught me when General Fuerte arrived and kissed the hands of Ena and Lena like a true old-fashioned gentleman. Then he came to me and said, ‘We might need your help,’ and I said, ‘Why? Has the three-hundred-year-old man come back and assaulted someone? Has the Conde finally split someone’s nose? Has Felicidad broken a plate over Don Emmanuel’s head? Has someone eaten a Pollo de un Hombre Verdadero at Dolores’ restaurant?’ And the General said, ‘No, guess again.’

‘Has Hectoro taken a fourth wife? Has the machine broken down? Are we fetching more tractors?’

And the General said, ‘You are on the right track, cabrón. We are going to build a wall across the valley in front of the city.’

‘What?’ I cried. ‘More labours?’

I was aghast because apart from helping to fetch the tractors I had helped Dionisio and Profesor Luis to build the great map of the world in the marsh, and I had had enough of breaking my bones and tearing
my hands. I was even more perturbed when I discovered the reasons for the wall, and I ran down to the plaza, unable to believe my ears.

‘Why should we build a wall because we have been told to do so by the purported ghost of Aurelio’s adopted daughter?’ I asked, and all I heard in reply was nonsense. Sergio said, ‘It is because this time the gods will be unable to help us,’ and I exclaimed, ‘What do you mean by “this time”?’ Misael told me, ‘It is because circumstances have confused the saints.’ Remedios said, ‘We need fortifications,’ and I demanded, ‘Why? Are we to expect an invasion?’ And Dolores the whore observed, ‘Let the invaders be rich and horny, and I am content.’

Against this farrago of nonsense I was unable to make myself heard, what with Don Salvador the False Priest quoting obscenities in Latin and the Conde waving his sword about and declaring that he would bathe the invaders in rivers of blood, and Father Garcia solemnly explaining that the Archangel Sandalphon was deeply concerned for our safety. Don Emmanuel said, ‘It will not do any harm to keep us all busy; one’s hands should always be occupied,’ and Felicidad spat on the ground and said, ‘It is how your hands are occupied that grieves me.’

So we built the wall. I was glad for once of the conquistadors brought back to life by Aurelio. Normally they swagger about in their rusty armour, drinking to excess, tripping over the recumbent jaguars and causing distress to the women with their persistent oaths and molestations, and on top of that they have the vacant expressions of cretins and they dribble. Aurelio says that it is on account of their long freezing over the centuries and that we should be patient with them, but I have no tolerance any more. Except that now that we were occupied upon a military project that was comprehensible to them, they worked like slaves.

We brought enormous quantities of cement and sand from Ipasueño, which Doña Constanza paid for, and I lost count of the number of times we went backwards and forwards to Ipasueño with recuas of mules. I lost all the weight that I had put on since I had been cared for by Ena and Lena. We built up a wall three metres high and two metres deep that stretched right across the valley, with a gatehouse at the centre for ingress and exit, and a low arch to permit the flow of the river. We had problems at the ends because an invader
could just have scrambled up the slopes and circumvented our battlements, and so we build it up along the mountainsides until it was so difficult to build any further that we reckoned that, if we could not go any higher, neither could anyone else climb round it.

Just when I believed that our months of toil were finished and I was thinking that there would be a great fiesta to celebrate, it was made known that the Conde had declared that in his long experience such a wall was useless without a moat, because one could bring ladders and grappling irons up to it. So the work began all over again, and we dug a moat in the silt and piled the spoil up against the wall so that the stone would be protected from missiles. Profesor Luis calculated the contours of the canal and it filled to perfection from the river just as soon as we lifted the wooden gates. Doña Constanza declared that she now understood that the canal to her swimming pool would have worked perfectly well if the work had been properly done. It appears that she has never been explicitly told that her pet project was sabotaged deliberately. To everyone else this is common knowledge and a reliable source of laughter.

‘Fiesta time,’ I thought, and was thinking up plans for a concert by the town band. I wrote a marinera and a jarabe in my head and was wondering who I could ask to make up a joropo dancing party, when Aurelio announced to all and sundry that he wished to conduct an experiment.

Aurelio is an Aymara, and for centuries his people were under the tutelage of the Incas. To this day every Aymara speaks some Quechua, the language imposed by the emperors. Aurelio said that he wished to see if it was possible to build walls in the ancient style, with polygonal blocks fitting so perfectly that one could insert not even a knife between them. He observed that it could do no harm to build the wall even higher. Hectoro proposed dismantling the temple of Viracocha and reutilising the blocks on the wall, but the man is a philistine even though he pretends to read so much. His book is always held upside down, and he moves his lips.

To my amazement there was general consent to this idea; Dionisio told me that all of them owed their very existence to Aurelio, and were willing to please him. It seemed that he wanted us to gather in the plaza by the axle-pole, and on the appointed evening we trooped
down there, even Ena and Lena, who were reconciled with me by that time because I had apologised.

There were four great fires built, and Aurelio appeared dressed all in white, the colours of a witch amongst his people. He spoke to us, saying, ‘In the days of my ancestors one made walls like this; firstly one poured a fluid over a rock to make it soft like clay, and one put it into place and fashioned it. Then one poured over it another liquid and it was made back into stone, and this is the cause that Inca walls are as they are. There is nothing I want you to do tonight except to stay here, for your presence alone will help whilst I bargain with the ancestors for the recipes.’

Having said that, he walked straight through one of the fires. A gasp came up out of the people because all of us thought that he would be burned. But he came out unscathed and walked straight through the fire opposite. We gasped again, but once more he came through untouched. He mumbled loudly the whole time, and he continued walking through the four fires, one after the other, until the miracle became veritably tedious. I amused myself by looking at the paintmarks on the moon.

Eventually he came for the last time out of the flames with his clothes covered in soot and the soles of his feet apparently smouldering. He coughed, and said, ‘Thank you, that is all.’

With a strong sense of anticlimax we all went home, for it seemed as though nothing was to happen. But a week later Aurelio came back from the jungle with four mules laden with sacks, and he appropriated Dolores’ cauldron that she uses normally to make guarapol at candombles. I do not know what grisly objects went into the concoction, because they all seemed shrivelled and without identity, but I went down to watch him once and saw him swig a mouthful of rum. He spat it over the brew and it caught fire most spectacularly. He also blew a great deal of cigar-smoke over it and pounded his coca-gourd relentlessly with that hypnotically rapid and deft delving of the pestle.