The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (3 page)

There was at the far end of the town a tienda that sold goods brought in by mule-train from Ipasueño, and so every few days I would find myself rattling and bumping my way to it on Antoine’s formidable old tractor. This shop was owned by a middle-aged couple who left the running of it to their daughter, a girl of twenty or so years whose name was Ena, as I discovered by overhearing the father asking of her the price of a bottle of Ron Caña.

Ena was small and strongly built; usually she wore a plain, faded blue dress, and her feet were always bare. Sometimes I used to think that her head was very slightly too large for her, but she had an appealing and serene face framed by her long black hair. She reminded me forcibly of a Greek girl with whom I had once been in love, for she had the same smooth and soft olive skin, and big brown eyes beneath eyebrows almost heavy enough to meet in the middle. On her forearms were the traces of soft black downy hair, which, to be frank, is something that has always driven me crazy, and her fingers were slim and elegant.

The best thing about her, however, was her elfin spirit; she had an air of quiet amusement, a semi-concealed puckishness, an innocent devilry, that gave her the aura of having existed from all eternity, and of being able to see the funny side of virtually everything. I perceived that she had a streak of mischief in her, as was to be revealed when I discovered how it was that she had kept me for so long in ignorance.

I had found in Sr. Vivo an inexhaustible library of Andean tunes, and he had also taught me to play the guitar, pointing out that it was a perfect instrument for arranging on, as it had the capacity for three different voices at once. It was my custom then, as it is still, to spend a part of every evening during and after sunset learning and practising new pieces sitting on the doorstep of my front door. The acoustics of the quiet air of the mountainside were absolutely perfect, and Antoine used to say that I could be heard clearly all over the town. ‘Listen,’ the people would say, ‘the Mexicano is playing again.’ Sometimes I would stop and hear the crickets setting up their own ragged
symphonies, and, as I have unnaturally sharp hearing, I could listen also to the conversations of the bats.

One evening I was playing ‘El Noy de la Mare’, which is a particularly lovely folk-tune from Catalonia. It is quite difficult to play because its variations are very subtle, and I still play it often to remind myself of the gratitude I feel for what it helped to bring about.

I thought I saw a shadow move in the darkness behind the wall, and then disappear. I was puzzled, but thought no more of it, and began to play the arrangement for guitar of the ‘Requiem Angelico’ that Sr. Vivo and I had made between us. To me it seemed exquisitely tender, and I became wholly lost in it. When I had finished something made me look up, and again I saw a shadow move, except that this time it detached itself from the darkness and then came towards me. The tune had made me think of the earth goddess that they worship around here, Pachamama, and for some reason I momentarily felt an awed panic that it was Pachamama herself that I had evoked. But it was Ena.

She stood before me, and I saw that her huge brown eyes were brimming with tears. We looked at one another in silence for a few moments and then, with all the natural grace of a little girl, she sat down cross-legged in front of me and said very gravely, ‘That was so beautiful. I have never heard such saudade. Please play it again.’

‘I do not play it too well,’ I said. ‘You should hear Sr. Vivo play it.’

‘Play it again,’ she said, ‘except for me this time, and not for whoever it was that you were thinking about.’

I was a little startled at this, and I laughed at her percipience. But as I began to play it I realised that I wanted to play it especially well for her, and that I was trying too hard. I fumbled a few notes and then forced myself to stop thinking, so that I could enter into the music.

When I had finished she reached forward with a wondering expression and tenderly brushed her hand across the strings. Then she leaned back and sighed very deeply. ‘I wish I could do that,’ she said at last.

‘Perhaps one day you will.’

‘No, never. For that one needs a lot of sadness. I do not have
enough sadness.’ Then she laughed and cut me a sideways glance. ‘Now tell me, who is the one you were thinking of when you were playing before?’

‘She lives in Mexico City,’ I confessed, much to my own surprise. ‘She is younger than me, and older than you. Unfortunately she does not love me, and so . . .’ I shrugged, ‘. . . I play sometimes for someone who never hears.’

‘You should play only for those who listen, and love only those who love in return. That is what I would do.’

‘You are wiser than me, I think.’

‘Obviously. Now play me some Spanish ones, real Spanish ones, with duende and gracia.’

The only variety of flamenco with which I was aquainted was the soleares, the solea, and soledades, because that was all that Sr. Vivo himself had learned when he had once visited Andalucia. One can play these pieces quite slowly, because their theme is the melancholy of solitude. I played four in a row, during which time she sat with her head cocked to one side watching my fingers attentively. At the finish she said, ‘Your hands are like spiders. I think that you should learn the tiple and the charango as well.’ Then she stood up and straightened her one blue dress, saying, ‘I think that I shall return tomorrow. This is a good way to break a paseo.’

‘Ena,’ I asked, ‘why is it that sometimes your parents call you “Ena” and sometimes “Lena”? I have often wondered.’

She laughed lightly. ‘If that puzzles you, I will tell you. It is because when I was very little I could not say “Lena”, so I said “Ena” instead. So now I have both the names at once.’

‘A very simple explanation. Be careful how you walk, out on your own,’ I said.

She glanced at me over her shoulder as she walked away, ‘Do not trouble yourself, this is not Mexico City.’ I watched her vanish into the darkness, turning to wave before she disappeared, and I was left alone with the cicadas.

HE ARRIVED ON
the day when Dolores the whore was giving Doña Constanza her last lesson in the indispensable art of making chuño. At school Doña Constanza had learned only how to make canapés and vol-au-vents, these being the only skills appropriate to a lady of her oligarchic status, who would be presumed always to have teams of cooks at her beck and call. But now that she had demoted herself to the position of campesino’s lover, exiled forever to this settlement in the sierra, she was ashamed of her idleness and was embarrassed that Gonzago did all the cooking in their household.

Dolores the whore, on the other hand, had learned to cater for squads of children by different fathers, and had decided to diversify her economic activities. ‘I am certainly forty years old or thereabouts, and all this squeezing and moaning has worn me out,’ she said. ‘And after all this time I deserve a break from constantly dripping. From now on I am a whore only on Friday and Saturday nights.’

What gave her the idea of opening a restaurant was reading a book which she had bought from Dionisio in return for a bracelet that he intended to give as a present to Leticia Aragon. Dionisio had assured her that it was ‘un libro muy romantico’, and she had bought it in good faith, expecting it to be all about princes and princesses or perhaps a blonde and blue-eyed victim who is gallantly rescued by a Captain of the Dragoons who turns out to be her long-lost cousin, and so they can marry after winning with difficulty the permission of his parents, and do not have to elope after all.

But it turned out that Dionisio’s conception of a ‘very romantic book’ was a little different from hers. She read it impatiently, chewing the soggy cigar between her teeth, and waiting for the entry of the princess. Being unused to literary effort, she did not know how to recognise which were crucial parts of the story, and found herself most fascinated by the incidental recipes. The book was
Doña Flor And Her Two Husbands
, and she decided to open her own restaurant, resolving to call it ‘Doña Flor’s’.

The enterprise was not without its difficulties. In the first place she was obliged to dig a new building out of the mud, which had by now drained itself very effectively and become adamantine. Her life as a whore had given her a great love of her freedom, but at this time she felt the lack of a helpmeet. ‘Ay, ay,’ she would say, ‘if only there were some man to come and dig,’ and she would mop the sweat from her face with the hem of her skirt before resuming her labours. She greatly regretted that her oldest sons had disappeared to look for diamonds in the jungle, that her two eldest daughters had traipsed away to Valledupar to take up their mother’s profession, and that the remainder of her brood were only old enough to carry away the bricks of spoil and could not help with the digging.

But one day when she was working she sensed a presence behind her. Her heart leapt, and she turned and beheld Fulgencia Astiz. Dolores suffered from what in learned circles would be called an ‘abnormal surprise reflex’, and she stood paralysed with her arms outstretched and her mouth wide open. Everyone who knew her was used to this, and often the little children would creep up on her, bang a saucepan next to her head just to see her gaping, and then run away screaming with laughter before she could recover. But Fulgencia had never seen this before, and she was puzzled by this extraordinary reaction to her presence; it looked as though Dolores had been frozen in the act of being about to give her a hug, and she stepped back and left quickly.

But later on Dolores sought Fulgencia out, and, to put it in short, they soon found that they had become friends. Fulgencia had been the leader of Dionisio’s women in Ipasueño; she was a Santandereana, and there was nothing she liked more than to become involved in heroic feats, preferably entailing the risk of death or, failing that, a little bloodshed. She was constructed in the good peasant fashion, with a broad flat face and high cheekbones. She wore her hair in the same manner as Remedios, in a black ponytail, and many a man had at one time or another realised by the force of her blows to the side of his head that she was a strong woman, not to be fooled around with. She fetched ten more women who had been in the camp with her at Ipasueño, and they dug out Doña Flor’s in no time at all, thatched it in two days, and buried a llama foetus in the floor to ensure the fecundity of Dolores’ new business.

But Dolores was a wilful proprietor. She did not see why her own mealtimes should be disrupted, and so she closed the restaurant at breakfast, midday, and seven o’clock in the evening, and she would not open during the hours of siesta on the grounds that she needed one as much as anyone else. This meant that she was only open for trade in the mornings after everyone had departed for their labours, and in the evenings when everyone had already eaten. This was a good arrangement in only one way, which was that she hardly ever had to do any work.

Having passed this stage, and having decided to open at saner times, she then displayed a side of her character which had been hitherto undisclosed to those who knew her. It transpired that she was an obsessive experimentalist. In trials with aji sauce she developed one that was so indescribably hot that it became instantaneously famous. It was the kind of aji sauce that is tasteless for the first few chews, and which then seizes the back of the throat and sends one into a kind of frenzied dementia where one clasps the throat with one hand, half gets out of the chair, sinks back into it, waves the free hand about, emits strangled noises, gasps for water, drinks it in one swig, discovers that water only makes it worse, and then rushes out to throw oneself in the river, from which one emerges dazed and dripping with sweat, smiling sheepishly.

Dolores made a lot of money out of this dish; she served it up with braised chicken and called it Pollo de un Hombre Verdadero. This Chicken of a True Man was taken up as a challenge by all the men of the city who prided themselves in their machismo. One after the other they were brought in by their compadres and challenged to eat the whole meal without so much as a grimace. Anyone who succeeded was immediately raised to the élite in the machismo stakes, and it was a common thing to hear it said of someone, ‘What? He is no man, he could only eat a little of Dolores’ chicken,’ or ‘Did you hear about Hectoro? He ate two of Dolores’ chicken one after the other without even taking a drink. ¡Qué hombre!’

But nobody truly enjoyed this ordeal, and the men began to suspect that Dolores had found a subtle way of mocking them. They started to avoid coming to the restaurant in case somebody challenged them to trial by chicken, and so Dolores began her next flurry of experimentation. She tried Fish with Forty Cloves of Garlic, which
did not prove popular, and which proved to be tedious on account of having to do so much peeling. She tried a confection called Woman’s Revenge, which consisted of testicles afloat in a tapioca sauce of suggestive appearance, but discovered that it could only be a seasonal dish, since the steers were rounded up and corraled for gelding but once a year. She invented a dish consisting of several layers of tortilla with something different between each layer, depending upon what was available, which she called Bocadillo Improvisado; it turned out to be very popular with women, who have, as it is generally conceded all over the world, more adaptable and exploratory appetites than men.

At the end of her fantasia period Dolores began to serve up standard favourites, such as picante de pollo, arepas, chiles rellenos, carnitas, salpicon, and esquites, but we should not fail to mention in conclusion her final major experiment, which was with frijoles refritos. She discovered that refried beans could be made to be quite phenomenally carminative by beating eggs into it and using several different kinds of beans all in the same mash. It was this that she served to people upon whom she wished to exercise her sense of humour, and it was the very same one that caused a temporary falling out between Felicidad and Don Emmanuel, this latter having grown extraordinarily fond of it.