The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (7 page)

We have established that in the matter of orthodoxy of belief, our clergy matches almost precisely the general doctrinal confusion characteristic of the nation as a whole, which prompts one to question the efficiency of our seminaries. We will deal with this aspect, namely, the varieties of Christian belief, in part three of our report, part two being concerned with aberrant and diabolical practises amongst the people. We conclude this section by noting that in his inaugural speech to the Fourth Lateran Council, His Holiness Pope Innocent III declared that the vice of the laity was caused directly by that of the clergy.

IT IS AN
almost invariable fact of experience that consuming passions may arise only when there is time and energy for them; love asserts as its precondition a degree of social organisation and economic stability that allows for leisure, and in this fallow field the seeds of desire, blown in by the winds, germinate, take root, and grow rampant as the orchids of the jungle.

Of course, many loves were already established at the time of the migration from the region of Chiriguana; that of Profesor Luis and Farides had grown naturally in the village now buried in silt, Doña Constanza and Gonzago had conceived their passion in the indolence of the encampment of the People’s Vanguard, as had Gloria and Tomás, and the ghostly love of Federico and Parlanchina had blossomed in the infinite leisure of death.

It would be tempting to describe the efflorescence of love in Cochadebajo as a plague, a plague as beneficent as the great plague of cats, except that the word would seem inappropriate when signifying what was in truth the bloom that springs inevitably out of the loam of civilisation.

At first, the people had concerned themselves solely with the business of survival, when there was nowhere to live and food was scarce. The task of digging out the ruins of the ancient Inca town took many months, and during this time the people were buffeted by the rains and baked by the sun. Most of the houses were intact, excellently constructed, with stones so perfectly shaped that a piece of paper could not have been slipped between them even though they were mortarless. But the old palm roofs had long ago rotted to slime, and an abysmal dankness hung about the place that it seemed no amount of air and sunshine could dispel. To begin with they huddled together at night in the Palace of the Lords or in the Temple of Viracocha, warmed by each other’s bodies and the musky heat of the cats.

During the day they laboured fitfully, digging the mud out in
blocks that were passed up the human chain to reconstruct the andenes that were eventually to circle the city and provide it with potatoes, quinoa and beans, giving the mountainsides the appearance of having been made into staircases for Titans. Others laboured to make adobe to patch up the places where stones had rotted away from buildings, and others still disappeared into the sierra to hunt meat or to go on relentlessly arduous treks in search of palm to thatch the houses.

The people grew thin with labour and lack of food, but toiled on in the faith that one day they would rest unmolested in their remote city, leading uneventful lives, growing a little fat, glad that the excitements of war would pass them by. They hoped that history would forget them and carry on by itself in other places. This hope sustained them, as did the guinea pigs, viscachas and vicuñas brought in by the stupendous cats and by the hunters, along with the mule-loads of bananas, lemons and almonds traded with the Indian settlements scattered about the sierra. As their clothes fell into shreds from constant toil they were replaced by garments woven by those same Indians, until eventually one would have had the impression that here was an intact pre-Columbian settlement, were it not for the black and mestizo faces replacing the calculatedly expressionless Indian faces that one might have expected to see above those bright red and black stripes. Neither were Indians so tall; here were Misael and Pedro, both nearly two metres in stature, and here was Felicidad, slim and dark like those who dance the siguiriyas in Andalucia, quite unlike the squat indigenous women with their small mouths, heavy thighs, and their multiplicity of petticoats.

It was when they were levering the remains of the natural dam over the edge of the precipice in order to complete the drainage of the city that Misael leaned over and realised that three hundred metres below there stretched a site ideal for agriculture, if only one could reach it easily, without walking forever to get there roundabout. The great cascade of water from the breaking of the lake had flattened the forest below, covered it with a thick layer of fertile soil, and supplied it with a river flowing through it for irrigation. Most of the work was done. ‘Hijo de puta,’ he exclaimed, grinning from ear to ear, ‘am I or am I not a genius and the saviour of the city?’ He strode off to find Profesor Luis, who was building another windmill to turn a lorry
dynamo that would raise the voltage of part of the town to twenty-four. Luis was contemplating his work and wondering whether it could be transformed to a yet higher voltage without losing too many amps.

‘Hola, cabrón,’ said Misael, ‘this is indeed a fine machine.’ They stood together watching the two halves of an oil drum rotating in the breeze, and Misael put his hand on Profesor Luis’ shoulder. ‘I have a big challenge for you, the biggest of your life.’

‘A bigger one than getting my way with Farides?’

‘An even bigger one, viejo. Come and see.’

Gazing out over the plain below them, already green with the encroachment of nature, but its trees shattered to matchsticks, Misael was elated with his plan and Profesor Luis was inebriated by its grandeur. ‘It will be our estancia, our latifundo, it will be the best farm in the world.’

Profesor Luis shaded his eyes with his hand and squinnied against the light. ‘We will grow everything,’ he said, ‘We will grow rice in the damp parts, we will grow avocados and bananas, we will grow cattle where the land is fallow, we will drown in milk and cheese, we will flounder in an orgy of oranges.’

‘Maybe so,’ replied Misael, who was suspicious of poetry on all occasions except for this, ‘but you will have to construct a machine to help us up and down. It will be the biggest machine of your life, it will be a machine to make your windmills toys.’

‘I will make a machine,’ said Profesor Luis, ‘such as has never been seen.’ And he went away and lay down in the dark for two days with a blanket over his head until the germ of the machine wafted in on the mountain wind, settled in the silt of his imagination, broke its carapace with the force of its first sprout, developed tap roots and hair roots, budded with branches and the intimate details of flowers, and turned into a machine more magnificent than the system of the heavens. Profesor Luis went to eat picante de pollo in Dolores’ restaurant, wiped his mouth, sat back, and mentally prepared his exposition of the machine to the natural leaders of Cochadebajo de los Gatos.

‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth,’ he proclaimed grandiloquently, but the first great feat of Archimedean leverage to be performed was not the gathering of wherewithals, but the persuasion
of the people to undertake the colossal task in the first place. It seemed crazy to almost everyone that when they were still digging out the city, still remaking roofs, and scratching for food, someone should propose the diversion of labour into the construction of a giant lift.

‘You are more loco than Father Garcia,’ said Josef, his speech a little indistinct on account of the wad of coca in his cheek.

‘It is a wonderful idea,’ said Father Garcia with an expansive gesture, ‘we could have it raised and lowered metaphysically with the aid of angels. If I could be sure of the infallibility of levitation, I would operate it myself.’

‘We have too much else to do,’ said Remedios, ‘and if you think about it, we have just emigrated from the plain. Why should we want to go back down to it when here we are safe?’

‘But it is not the plain, Remedios, it is a plateau, and it is better for agriculture than the plain ever was.’

‘To me,’ said Remedios, ‘it is the plain,’ and she went back to cleaning her Kalashnikov and keeping an eye on the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, who was nostalgically drawing a diagram of a Landsknecht sword in the dust of the floor.

‘Bugger that,’ exclaimed Don Emmanuel when Profesor Luis outlined his plan, ‘I am already more worn out with labour than a Panamanian whore. This is a scheme for lazy times. Look how my belly has shrunk from digging the andenes.’

Profesor Luis scrutinised the proffered belly, tight as a drum and decorated with ginger hairs. ‘You exaggerate, Don Emmanuel,’ he said.

Hectoro puffed hard on his puro, squinting against the smoke and patting his horse’s neck. ‘Will I be able to descend on horseback?’ he enquired.

‘Undoubtedly,’ replied Profesor Luis.

‘Then maybe and maybe not,’ said Hectoro, who believed that the fewer words a man said, the more of a man he was, and the more of a man he was, the less he got off his horse.

It was true that Misael was in favour of the plan, since it had been his idea, but even he was now a little less enthusiastic about it because he had had several nightmares in which people hurtled to their deaths in a large wooden cage, and he was worried that it was a premonition.
‘We will hold a candomble to get the lift blessed by the saints,’ said Profesor Luis, ‘and then we will get Father Garcia to bless it, and then Aurelio will bless it with the Aymara gods and the Navante gods, and then it can never crash.’ That made Misael feel better about it, but left Profesor Luis a little guilty about having played upon his superstitious susceptibilities.

Profesor Luis was disheartened, but over the next few days it was noticeable that many people were going to the edge of the cliff and gazing out over the plain. Hectoro went, and had visions of an horizon of cattle grazing on lush grasses. Don Emmanuel saw groves of avocados, reminding him that back in the village the little boys used to steal his fruit and then try to sell it back to him. Remedios saw that indeed it was a plateau, and conceived of it as a line of self-defence in the event of attack from the east, and as a place of tactical withdrawal if the assault were from the west. Doña Constanza and Gonzago went out there in the sunset, and dangled their legs over the edge. ‘Gonzito,’ she said, ‘there is a lot of privacy down there. Remember how we used to make purple earthquakes under the trees and behind the waterfall?’

‘Fine days,’ replied her lover. ‘One day we will go down there and find a place with no ants to chew our backsides, and not under a tree either, so that we are not shat upon by birds, and we will make purple earthquakes all over again, and shout as much as we like.’

‘I am sick of falling out of the hammock,’ she said, ‘even though it was amusing to begin with.’

‘One day we will make a decent bed, and one day we will go down there and have no need of one.’

And so it was that, much to his gratification, Profesor Luis found that people were coming to him and asking, ‘What do you need for this machine?’ and an improbable stockpile of heterogeneous articles began to accumulate at the edge of the precipice, some found lying about inexplicably in the mountains, some scavenged from abandoned mine shafts, some prised away from the Indians in exchange for goats and teaspoons. There were huge iron hoops with pinchbolts, lengths of cable, steel wheels, pieces of crashed military helicopter, nuts and bolts with reversed threads in old British Standard sizes, a vast windlass that had to be transported by four bulls harnessed together, pitprops so old that they had turned to stone, beams from those
brontosaurial machines that once crushed ore with the motion of nodding donkeys, together with their gearwheels, antique block and tackles made of polished rosewood with toledo rivets embossed with coats of arms, and a separate pile of unidentifiable objects that ‘might come in useful for something’. ‘All I need now is three thousand metres of rope as thick as a man’s arm,’ announced Profesor Luis, ‘and lots of wheels from cars, with the hubs and bearings if possible.’

The latter was easy if arduous. All that one had to do was send out long expeditions to the places where there had been roads through the mountains in more prosperous times, or even to Ipasueño. At the bottom of precipices, down below hairpin bends, hidden beneath scrub, half-immersed in cataracts, were the innumerable wrecks of the vehicles of the inebriated and the unbraked. There one could find cars, trucks, lorries and coaches of all vintages and in all states of decay, many of them complete with skeletons picked clean by grateful birds, all of them inhabited by pumas and margueys, coral snakes and iguanas, except for the ones in the rivers colonised by fish and kingfishers.

It was all made easier by Doña Constanza, who, after a fierce fight with her conscience, went to Profesor Luis and coyly held out a small elongated green book. ‘I still have my chequebook,’ she said, ‘and I would like to help you to buy what you cannot find.’

Profesor Luis went with Doña Constanza and Gonzago to Ipasueño. It was just before the time when Dionisio Vivo killed Pablo Ecobandodo, and it was not a pleasant place to be, what with the addicts stopping the cars under the bridge and killing the occupants for money, and the motorcycle assassins roaring through the streets cutting policemen in half with bursts of explosive bullets. They came away with two mule-loads of spanners, hammers and wrenches, prodigious bolts, and heavy-duty hacksaws complete with spare blades. They had also been to see the manager of the State Mining Corporation’s Iron Ore Extraction Plant, and ordered a titanic reel of rope, to be delivered to the tiny pueblo of Santa Maria Virgen. It was the first time he had ever been bribed by a cheque from the disappeared wife of a multimillionaire. He waited for the cheque to clear, and contemplated not bothering to deliver the rope. But then he remembered that Mexican-looking young man who had been with her, and how he had promised to come and castrate him personally if
he reneged on the deal, and he went out with orders to the driver of the largest transporter.