These formidable idealists had their heads full of schemes of redistributing the wealth of the rich to the poor, which, if scrupulously carried out, would in sorry fact have given to each pauper enough money to buy three avocados per annum. They also wished to redivide the land, an experiment that once in Peru had caused the complete collapse of the rural economy, since the peasants had immediately reverted to unmechanised subsistence farming. Most importantly, these people had their eyes open and their ears perpetually pricked in the hope of hearing some new story that illustrated the oppression of the masses, and those involved in the crusade very soon found such dramas enacted aplenty before their very eyes. Such people act as the conscience of a nation, and they generally do not achieve power because they are pre-empted by concessions from those in authority, obliging them to look for something else about which to be outraged. But on this occasion no amount of protest seemed to awaken a spark of liberalism in the heart of Monsignor Rechin Anquilar.
The Monsignor found himself plagued by committees and delegations forming up outside his quarters every evening, pushing into his hands lengthy petitions and complaints signed by every one of their number. There were detailed eyewitness accounts of abuses and atrocities. He received elaborate and outspoken lectures from doughty nuns wearing battledress and enormous revolvers. He would gaze at them in angry silence, experiencing all the disdainful contempt that the autocrat feels naturally for conspiratorial gadflies, and would find amazement and disgust doing battle within himself at the mere idea that they had ever been accepted into the Church in the first place.
One day he summoned all of the radical clergy, and was obliged to wait whilst they held a vote amongst themselves as to whether or not they would go and see him. This was a lengthy process, since they had adopted the custom that all their votes should be unanimous, and therefore they would take many hours to arrive at a motion to which everybody could assent. Additionally, like all people who enjoy addressing each other as ‘comrade’, they were violently addicted to clauses, composites, sub-clauses, points of order, wordings of paragraphs, procedural formalities, and amendments of amendments.
After the discussion had raged for two days, Mgr Rechin Anquilar ordered his followers to strike camp, and when the exhausted committee emerged from their tent to go to see him in order to inform him that they had decided democratically not to go and see him, they discovered that there was no one left to go and see. They returned to their tent, and there they had another lengthy discussion about what to do next; but it took such a long time to arrive at a formula for a resolution upon which to vote in such a way that the outcome would be unanimous, that, once they had decided to rejoin the crusade, they had no prospect of finding it, since it was not clear where it had gone. Thus they returned to their clinics and their adult education projects in the slums, and the last chance was lost to save the crusade from becoming a plague. From that point forward, the only clerics left in the expedition were either fanatics or Holy Fools.
41 An Apocalypse Of Embarrassment Strikes The City (1)
‘EL GRAN AZORAMIENTO’ (The Great Embarrassment) happened not least on account of an importunate plague of pigs. Periodically it occurred that migrant swarms of these small black creatures with their Indian files of jaunty little piglets would move from adjacent valleys in search of succulent novelties, and the city of Cochadebajo de los Gatos would awake to find itself occupied by a scavenging army. The pigs would root through refuse, shamelessly raid kitchens and foodstores, flirt outrageously with their domestic cousins who were twice their size, and unearth whole crops of potatoes from the andenes. A paroxysm of exasperation would seize the people and they would issue forth armed with sticks and guns to drive the creatures away.
But the pigs were evasive and cunning; when one attempted to kick them, they skipped adroitly sideways, and one would fall over. They left rank little piles in just those places where one was most likely to slip on them, and they most disgustingly displayed a predilection for consuming dogshit with an expression of extreme rapture on their shiny faces. One of them had most memorably once eaten a man’s finger that had been severed by a machete.
Even the great cats of the city seemed to be confused by them; the cats had grown luxurious and idle, and were unable to select which one to pounce upon when there were so many from which to choose. Instead they swiped at them in passing or retired to the rooftops in search of peace, where no pigs could disconcert them by darting unexpectedly between their paws.
Hectoro would organise bloody massacres which involved all the men of the city, and most of the Spanish soldiers revived by Aurelio would take part, bloodlust being with them an even more powerful motive than desire. For days afterwards the aroma of roasting pork would drench the pajonales and pun as of the sierra, and an invasion of buzzards and vultures would disgust the people more even than the original outbreak of swine.
The first time that this happened there was a terrible pestilence of trichinosis and hookworm shortly afterwards. Profesor Luis was kept busy for days injecting formalin into the runnels that crisscrossed the bodies of the unfortunate, and Aurelio was obliged to travel back and forth to the jungle in order to collect poisons and cibil that would kill the parasites from within. Everybody had to endure the inconvenience of wearing shoes and the nausea caused by Aurelio’s medicines, which made one’s urine stink of corpses, and thereafter everybody followed Profesor Luis’ new addition to the constitution which stated that ‘No pork shall be cooked on the bone, and it shall be cooked until it is nearly falling to pieces. It is also forbidden to attempt to cure parasites by the hitherto traditional method which only makes them worse; that is, by forcing children to eat the excrement of dogs.’
In the Andes each season of the year is reprised every day. When General Hernando Montes Sosa arrived in a helicopter with Mama Julia and the British Ambassador at precisely ten hundred hours on June the sixth, it was just turning from spring to summer, and the town was in a frenzy of despair because its elaborate preparations had been wrecked by a sudden influx of pigs. From the air it seemed to the General that down below there had been a catastrophic attack of St Vitus’ dance, and from lower down he perceived that everybody was rushing this way and that in the attempt to catch what looked like particularly nimble small black dogs. When he dismounted from the helicopter he understood from the stench, from the squelch beneath his boot, and from the evidence of his eyes, that there had been a mass intrusion of wild pigs. Mama Julia glared balefully out of the door of the craft, and refused to come out. The British Ambassador exchanged his brogues for green wellington boots, and appraised the scene as being very similar to a prep school sports day or the opening of Harrods’ sale.
Dionisio and the formal party of welcome were not only shy, but were crimson about the ears for the shame of what their visitors must have thought of the town. All were deeply conscious of the importance of the Ambassador, but most were entirely ignorant of the necessary etiquette. Dionisio shook his hand, and Sergio curtsied. Hectoro took the puro from his mouth, spat on the ground in a manner intended to be respectful, and said, ‘Hola, cabrón, what do you want to see first, the Temple of Viracocha or the whorehouse?’ Misael doffed his sombrero, grinning dumbly from ear to ear. Don Emmanuel, who had laid special plans for the day, put on a perfect caricature of a public school accent, and said, ‘What ho, old bean, frightfully spiffing to meet you.’
The British Ambassador raised an eyebrow and very coolly replied, ‘Bertie Wooster, I presume,’ whereupon Don Emmanuel bowed deeply, swept his hat from his head, and thus revealed the balding patch upon which Felicidad had painstakingly written at his instruction ‘God Bless The Queen And All Who Sail In Her’.
The Ambassador raised the other eyebrow and twisted his lip sardonically. ‘I wish you a speedy recovery,’ he said, and passed on to shake the hand of the Mexican musicologist, who introduced him ‘to my two wives, Ena and Lena’. The Ambassador looked at the smiling twins, dressed the same, and
blinked hard. He shook his head as though to clear it of incomprehension, and double-checked that there were really two identical women before him who were married to the same man. His eyebrows rose to the top of his forehead once more, and he passed on to Remedios and Gloria, both dressed in khaki and armed with Kalashnikovs. ‘Welcome,’ announced Remedios, ‘but your foreign policy stinks.’
‘Gracias,’ replied the Ambassador, who understood very little Castilian as yet, and was guessing as to the correct response. ‘De nada,’ said Remedios, who had always heard that the British ruling classes were unnaturally polite.
At this point Aurelio came forward and presented each of the visitors with the customary bags of coca leaves and lejia, the lime necessary to activate them. The General frowned but took his bag out of courtesy, as did the Ambassador, and Mama Julia, who had by now summoned up enough courage to descend into the flurry of pigs, whispered in Dionisio’s ear, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’
‘Round here they chew them,’ he replied, and before he could prevent her, she had popped a wad into her mouth, and was saying, ‘Mmm, is this some kind of spinach?’ Throughout the day she surreptitiously sampled further mouthfuls, with results that will be revealed below.
‘I must apologise about the chaos,’ said Dionisio. ‘We have had an unexpected invasion of wild pigs, but we are doing our best to get rid of them.’
‘Never mind, my boy, you do your best, and we will try to ignore them,’ said the General, snapping out of the path of a young boar well-armed with sharp little tusks that Antoine the Frenchman was attempting to chase away.
The party was taken on a guided tour of the town, with Profesor Luis learnedly discoursing upon it, and Don Emmanuel translating for the benefit of the Ambassador:
Profesor Luis: This is the temple of Viracocha . . .
Don Emmanuel (translating): This is our very largest latrine, which doubles as a whorehouse in bad weather . . .
Mama Julia: I feel marvellous.
Profesor Luis: This is probably our biggest and best jaguar obelisk . . .
Don Emmanuel: This represents Pachacamac’s penis inserting itself into the resplendent pussy of the sky . . .
Mama Julia: I feel really marvellous.
Profesor Luis: This is the axle-pole with which we brought a giant reel of rope to the city . . .
Don Emmanuel: Here is our telephone system which operates on invisible wires . . .
Mama Julia: Oooooo, ay, ay, ay . . .
Profesor Luis: This is Doña Flor’s Restaurant, owned by Dolores . . .
Don Emmanuel: This is where Manco Capac stayed for four days when struck down by amoebic dysentery . . .
Mama Julia: I don’t feel hungry anymore, yahooha, oooooo . . . Profesor Luis: This is where the line of the mud used to come to before we dug the city out . . .
Don Emmanuel: The shit came up to here during the last plague of pigs . . .
Mama Julia (singing): There was a lovely sailor boy who came from far Peru . . .
General Hernando Montes Sosa: For God’s sake, my dear, what has got into you?
Mama Julia (singing): I said I’ll drop them down, my love, I’ll give it all to you . . .
General Hernando Montes Sosa: For God’s sake, woman.
Profesor Luis: This is Dionisio’s book exchange . . .
Don Emmanuel: This library houses a significant collection of early Byzantine pornography . . .
Mama Julia: La, la, la, I’ve forgotten the words, oo ah oo . . .
Dionisio was obliged to take his mother away and shut her in his house, still hopping from one foot to another and remembering snatches of naughty songs from her schooldays, and came back at just the moment when the British Ambassador was beginning to realise that Don Emmanuel’s translation was a joke at his expense. His ears became more and more flushed as his anger’ mounted and his diplomatic sang-froid became more strained. ‘What school did you go to?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Dartington,’ replied Don Emmanuel, whereupon the Ambassador said, ‘That explains it; I thought you were an unusual species.’
‘And where did you go to?’
‘Eton.’
‘Excellent, excellent,’ smiled Don Emmanuel, rubbing his hands together and gleefully realising that his weeks of choir practice had not been wasted. ‘How do you know when a whore is full up?’ he asked.
The Ambassador was astounded. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘She gets a runny nose,’ said Don Emmanuel.
The Ambassador winced and from that moment ignored his compatriot as far as could be managed under the circumstances, a feat that was made temporarily easier by the unanticipated non-cooperation of the titanic lift.
The General, Profesor Luis, the British Ambassador, and Hectoro (still mounted imperturbably upon his horse) had all got onto the lift and were descending towards the plateau. Profesor Luis was pointing out to the General the features of the landscape, and the General was feeling the profoundest admiration for the ingenuity of the constructors of the lift, when it ground suddenly to a halt, leaving them swaying in mid-air only half-way down the cliff. Profesor Luis instantly became agitated, for his contraption had failed when carrying by far the most important person that he had ever met. ‘I am so sorry,’ he repeated insistently, ‘I am so sorry, I cannot imagine what could have gone wrong,’ and hopped from one foot to the other, mopping his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and rushing from one end of the platform to the other, tugging futilely upon the massive ropes.
‘Please do not be so concerned,’ said the General, ‘the lifts in the government building do this all the time,’ and the British Ambassador, not for the first time, began to wish that he had not adopted a diplomatic career. ‘Have a puro,’ said Hectoro, offering each of them a cigar from the height of his saddle, ‘it will help to pass the time.’
Up on the top of the cliff there was much consternation; no matter how much the people heaved and Cacho Mocho strained, the pulleys were locked. One or two people who suffered from the deeply ingrained national suspicion of machinery could not suppress their glee, and walked about saying, ‘I told you no good could come of it; if God had wanted us to have lifts he would have created them Himself.’
Don Salvador the False Priest turned to Father Garcia and asked, ‘Can you not levitate down there and then push it up to the top again?’ And Father Garcia responded impatiently, ‘No, I cannot. In the first place I can only do it when I am not thinking about it, in the second place I cannot push anything else up because there is no ground against which to stand, and in the third place it only happens when I am preaching and I could not concentrate on a sermon under these circumstances. You must ask Profesor Luis what to do, for the machine is his, and only he understands it.’
But Profesor Luis was half-way down the cliff and was unavailable for comment. Sergio suggested fetching Dionisio, but he could not be found because he had taken his mother on a brisk walk in order to try to work off the anomalous effects that the coca had had upon her metabolism, and so the puzzle was left to Misael to resolve, since his had been the idea of building it in the first place.
He clambered all over the pulleys and gantries, peering into the works in order to see whether or not their alignment coincided with his memory of it, and attempting to ignore the unhelpful suggestions of those down below. In the lift, Hectoro’s horse trod heavily upon the foot of the British Ambassador, and Profesor Luis found himself unable to restrain the tears of his disgrace. He leaned against the side, his shoulders heaving, and General Hernando Montes Sosa felt obliged to pat him and make soothing noises.
Remedios decided to resume her habit of command, ordering everybody to solve the problem at once upon pain of her perpetual contempt, and at this point the Conde Xavier Pompeyo de Estremadura came forward, waving his sword dramatically and exclaiming, ‘I have it, by God, I have it. We had such a machine during the siege of Arakuy in the year of Our Lord one thousand, fifteen hundred and thirty-one. We would me
rely wind it back a mote and then release it, by God.’
The Conde’s idea was put into effect, and, as if by miracle, the lift jerked upwards and then resumed its long-delayed descent. The Conde leaned over the cliff, exultantly exclaimed, ‘God’s balls,’ and swaggered amongst the crowd, condescending to receive their congratulations. He ran towards Remedios, his lover, in order to enjoy the admiration that was his due, and fell headlong over a pig.
42 The Hummingbird
‘ARE YOU WELL, my cadenay?’ asked Concepcion. ‘The doctor says that the operation was very good.’
She was standing at the foot of the bed, attired in her best floral dress, clutching a straw hat that, owing to her nervousness, was in danger of becoming kneaded out of shape.
His Eminence smiled wanly and beckoned to her to come and sit by him on the bed. ‘Why do you have a black ribbon on your arm, querida? Did you think that I was going to die?’
She bit her lip, and her shoulders began to shake with suppressed grief. ‘It is Cristobal,’ she said, ‘I can’t find him, and it is all my fault.’
Deep concern passed over the Cardinal’s face. ‘What has happened?’
‘When you fell on the floor I ran to the secretary, and then the whole palace was running about calling ambulances, and everywhere was confusion, and then I came all the way here on foot so that you would not be ashamed, and I asked the doctor about you, and afterwards I went out, and I was crying so much that a kind woman in the street put me up for the night in a whorehouse, and in the morning I remembered, “Cristobal!” and I ran back to the palace to find him, and I looked everywhere, but he was gone. I went to the police to ask about any missing children, and they told me they had heard of thousands, but no one knows where they are, and I thought, “Perhaps he has run away,” but I could not think where he would go, and I asked all his friends if they had seen him, but nobody has.’