The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (49 page)

‘You are the best shot with a pistol,’ said Pedro diplomatically. ‘Everyone knows that, and I have often heard it said.’

‘I have more plans,’ said Don Emmanuel. ‘You have all forgotten Dionisio. One of you must fetch him, and the rest of you must round up all the jaguars in the city.’

So it was that there ensued an episode of merry mayhem as the reluctant and self-willed cats were prodded off roofs with long poles, heaved from their owners’ hammocks, aroused from somnolence by handclaps beside their ears, prised away from bowls of chocolate and guava jam, kidnapped from protective children and fond adults, and herded into the plaza in order to be addressed by Dionisio. Most of the voluptuous and gigantic creatures lay together in tangled heaps of glistening black fur and fell promptly asleep. Others paced back and forth, as though caged, and others still sat upon their haunches, their tails twitching and their mouths gaping in enormous yawns that exposed their pink gums and sabre teeth.

Dionisio arrived from his bookshop with his own two black jaguars, aware that for the first time his legendary telepathy with animals was
about to be tested publicly. Virtually the entire populace of the city turned out to see what he would say to the cats; some said, ‘He will speak to them in Castilian, except that the meanings will be in cat language,’ and others said, ‘He will speak to them in a language unknown to any of us.’

In fact the occasion was a disappointment for those who anticipated a grand and supernatural spectacle. Dionisio stood at the same spot where Father Garcia and Don Salvador the False Priest were wont to preach their gospel of procreation and renewal. He closed his eyes and thought himself hard into the mentality of the jaguar, until he could not imagine himself crossing an open space and his skin itched with botfly-worm. He knew suddenly how it was to pin down a turtle with one paw, and bite out a circular hole in the place where the front plate meets the back so that the flesh can be scraped out with the other paw. The focus of his mind’s vision changed, so that it was not the single spot of the human but the horizontal slot of the predator. He knew abruptly the sharp twinge of defecating armadillo scales, and his own thoughts turned from the shadow castle of words into guttural grunts and bright unmediated intuitions. His tongue grew sharp and backward-pointing papillae, and his teeth knew the joy of crunching away in one bite the cranial cap of a peccary so that its brains could be savoured greedily. He stood, mesmerising a howler monkey with his golden eyes, until, branch by branch, it could not help but descend from the tree. He felt the rush of anger and hostility when, amongst the rich, damp, and fetid smells of the jungle floor, he detected the pungent spore of a rival male.

The part of Dionisio that was still himself then reminded him to think further into the mind of the Cochadebajo cats. He became lazy and tolerant, playful and affectionate. His mouth filled with saliva at the thought of chocolate, and his flesh was made of stuff invulnerable to bullets and the snares of man, as all animals must evolve to be if they are to remain upon the earth in the fullness of time.

‘The cats are not listening,’ said old man Gomez, pointing to the way in which the assembly of jaguars was persisting in its habitual way, playfighting, sleeping, or gazing raptly into empty space.

‘Do not be stupid,’ remonstrated Pedro, who was standing next to him, ‘cats are always paying attention. Everyone knows this. They are perverse, and they like to play at deception.’

Dionisio felt suddenly that he was keyed into the world of the cats, and his own soul disappeared into an attunement in which he saw exactly what was to be done, knowing that the cats also would perceive it. He opened his eyes and said, ‘Vamos.’

The sleek and massively puissant animals arose and stretched, their forepaws clawing the dust before them, and their muscles flexing. They looked at Dionisio expectantly, and turned to follow him to the drawbridge. When it was lowered, his own two jaguars rubbed their cheeks against his waist to mark him as their own as they did each day, and he started out with his feline army to take on the crusaders.

‘Dionisio, do not go, please.’ It was Leticia Aragon, her eyes, which today were the colour of lapis lazuli, fixed on a dreadful possibility, and her hair that seemed to be made of black spiderweb falling about her face. ‘Do you want Parlanchina to be fatherless? And her child to be without a grandfather?’ She indicated the compact hump of her pregnancy.

Dionisio put his hand on her neck and smiled softly. ‘Leticia, you know better than that.’

‘He has balls,’ said Hectoro, as Dionisio left the city amid the sea of cats, which were now spreading out to advance like an old-fashioned formation of infantrymen. ‘I never knew we had so many,’ said Pedro.

‘I love to see the waving of their tails when they walk,’ said Remedios.

The crusaders looked along the valley and detected a glimmer of motion. It was as though the whole valley floor was a field of blackened wheat, with one solitary reaper walking in its midst. ‘What is happening?’ asked Monsignor Anquilar, coming to the frontline in response to the buzz of activity that was sending his men scurrying forward with their arms. He shaded his hand against the mountain light and exclaimed, ‘The Devil is afoot. We are being advanced upon by the animal accomplices of hell.’

It seemed that no relentless volleys and fusillades could halt that inexorable advance. It seemed that no one could shoot down the one enormous man who paced forward in tune with the black beasts. When the company of cats were at a distance of one hundred metres, when they were stalking on their stomachs as their instincts dictated,
when the assault seemed inevitable and too horrifying to contemplate, the crusaders and priests threw down their weapons and ran.

Dionisio felt in his own muscles the primeval feline urge to give chase and leap, to rend and tear, to torture and to subdue. But he halted the line and called in the animals behind him.

‘Why did you stop?’ asked General Fuerte, who had been watching through the army binoculars that nowadays he used for ornithology. ‘You could have defeated them utterly.’

They were sitting in Dionisio’s house drinking tintos. His two cats were fast asleep on the rug with their feet in the air, and their sweet smell of hay and strawberries pervaded the room. ‘They were already defeated,’ said Dionisio. ‘There was no need of bloodshed. There will be a great fiesta tonight.’

Indeed there was. The town band and choir played its entire repertoire of Don Emmanuel’s bawdy English songs five times. It continued its retreta with vallenato dances, bambuco, and salso. It played Argentinian tangos, and the immensely turgid and lengthy national anthem, to which they bawled Don Emmanuel’s rewritten and cheerfully obscene lyrics. Profesor Luis rigged up the gramophone to the windmill, and they wept communally to sentimental songs from Peru about desertion, premature death, and poverty. Doña Constanza became lewdly inebriated and had to be carried home by Gonzago and Tomás. Remedios sat with Gloria in the plaza and reminisced about their guerrilla days. Don Salvador the False Priest fell over in the whorehouse and hurt his shins.

Father Garcia went up on the walls to take a breath of fresh air that would combat the rising nausea of pisco in his guts, and found the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura sitting alone on the wall. ‘What are you doing, cabrón?’ he asked.

‘The accursed English have returned,’ said the Conde, pointing a wavering finger along the valley. Father Garcia adjusted his eyes with difficulty and followed the sweep of the Conde’s gesture. He saw a ring of fires in motion. ‘Listen,’ said the Conde, and Father Garcia heard the brassy tinkle of a distant bell. As the wind shifted he heard the monotonous incantation of priests and smelled the sweet aroma of incense. ‘This is something in Latin,’ said Garcia, his hare’s eyebrows quivering with speculation. ‘What are they doing?’

‘You should know that,’ replied the Conde, ‘and you a priest. I saw
this once in Valencia when there was a plague of incubi that molested the women at night. They are doing an exorcism.’

‘But what are they exorcising? It makes no sense.’

But in the morning, when the town arose late from its merriment with a collective hangover which they intended to dispel with further medicinal doses of alcohol, there was about the place an eerie atmosphere of absence. People wandered the streets looking for what was missing without knowing what it was. Their puzzlement lifted, but desolation and confusion rose in their hearts, when they realised abruptly that all the cats had gone.

FATHER GARCIA, WHO,
as always, levitated from the ground when mystically illuminated or argumentatively emphatic, explained the disappearance of the cats thus:

‘My friends, it is true that we were told that the gods and saints would not fight in this war because they are confused by it, and yet it is also true that our trusty and confiding cats have been exorcised from us by priests, as I saw with my own eyes when I was drunk but still rational, as the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura will bear witness. How is this to be explained? Did the saints lie to Parlanchina, who gave their message to Aurelio to give to us? Did Parlanchina misunderstand them? Was it a demon disguised as Parlanchina?

‘No, it was not. For it is true that the gods and saints have not intervened. Who has intervened then? I wish you to recall my teaching, which last night was proved empirically to be true. For I have told you repeatedly that this world is evil because the god that made it was evil, which is to say that God is in true fact the Devil. The One God who made spirit was not the God who made matter, as I have many times clearly explained. It follows that the priests who are encamped far up the valley are the unwitting accomplices of Satan, for they believe that they follow the Spirit Creator when in fact they follow the World Creator, who gave them many bad commands and wicked precepts. He set evil in their hearts, telling them that it was good. Where there was compassion he sowed brutality. Where there was merriment, festivity and joyful copulation, he sowed grimness, disapproval, and frigidity, because in this way he desired to taint love and tarnish happiness. He dressed his priests in black, for this is the colour of mourning, and their souls he shrouded in stone so that the ice of fanaticism froze out the light of reason and the exhilarating wisdom of conjecture. In this way was the modesty of speculation replaced by the iron cage of certainty.

The explanation is simple, my friends. The saints have refused to fight, and the Spirit Creator never fights, for he manifests His Love
but not His Power. But the World Creator has not refused to fight, and therefore it follows that we lost the cats because of a ceremony of the Devil.

‘But I have told you all before that the Spirit Creator has deemed it good to begin a new creation in ourselves, and we must not lose heart. We cannot lose our New World now, when it has only just begun, and therefore we must continue boldly, in the faith that what was lost shall through our courage and enterprise be restored. For you know that our cats were never true cats of flesh and blood. They were cats formed of angelic matter which is not the stuff of blood and bone, but is ethereal matter that has been condensed that it may manifest. This explains their love of chocolate and sweet things, and why otherwise they did not have to eat. They arrived mysteriously amongst us, unbidden, and now they have gone, but we shall not be dismayed nor deterred.
Deo Gratias. Dominus Vobiscum.
Amen.’

Hectoro rode up and spoke to him, face to face where he hovered above the ground. ‘I hope, cabrón, that the Spirit Creator can restore terraces, because they are tearing down the stones to build barricades and are harvesting our crops so that they can eat them themselves.’

Father Garcia was so disconcerted by this information that his trance abruptly broke, and he fell to the ground, bruising his ankle. ‘I have told you many times not to do that when I am levitating,’ he said to Hectoro reprovingly. ‘One day it may lead to a serious accident.’

What Hectoro had said was true. The crops of quinoa, pulses and potatoes were being pillaged by the hungry crusaders. General Fuerte stood upon the wall, peering through his binoculars, and passing the information to the people with him. Soon it was not enough that solely his eyes should witness the wrecking of the andenes that rose in steps high up the valley walls, and which held back the fertile mud that had been placed there during the original excavation of the city. His binoculars were passed from hand to hand, and the sense of outrage grew as it became clear that the crusaders were not only taking the food, but were transferring the stones of the walls down to the valley floor so that they could construct makeshift fortifications.

Pedro the Hunter appeared with a rifle. A wave of comment and speculation passed through the people, for Pedro hunted always with an ancient musket that was held together with wire, and whose
ammunition he was obliged to make himself in an equally antiquated mould. But now he held Sergio’s Lee-Enfield, the very same rifle that had once been stolen from his father by Federico when he had run away from home to take vengeance upon the Army. It was a legendary rifle, for with it Federico had killed the mountain rangers who had sought out the guerrillas in the sierra, and it was said that whoever used it was guided by the spirit of Federico, and therefore could not miss. Its range was greater than a modern weapon, its long barrel made it accurate, and its heavy ammunition not only pierced flesh, but shattered bones. There was only one box of .303 shells left, and Pedro had determined to make every bullet count. He lay down upon the wall, clicked the pillars of the sights upwards, and wound the knurled wheel to adjust them. He picked on a sturdy man who was standing still, directing the transfer of rocks. A silence fell upon the people as they awaited the crash of the weapon. Pedro aimed right to allow for the idiosyncrasy of the rifle, and fired.

General Fuerte swore afterwards that through his binoculars he had seen the bullet travel in a curve, waver, and disappear into the middle of the man’s back. What the crowd saw was a tiny figure in the distance throw up his arms, wheel in a half circle, and fall upon his face. They saw the remainder of the crusaders scurry for shelter, crawling from one inadequate hiding place to another. The people of Cochadebajo de los Gatos clenched their fists and shook them in triumph: ‘Bravo, Pedro. Viva, viva Don Pedro.’