Concepcion put her hand over that of Guzman, as though by this gesture she could reconcile him to the history of his failure, and he said, ‘I hear that the Cardinal has resigned, proclaiming himself unworthy of the position. Perhaps things will improve a little now.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Don Balsal. ‘The only thing that will improve this place in the absence of good government would be if some rich benefactor moved into the district, secured some essential services, and provided some employment.’
‘You might get some terrible caudillo who reduces you all to servitude,’ observed Guzman. ‘I hear that philanthropic landlords are few and far between.’
‘There is no civilisation without good cooking,’ said Concepcion. ‘Eat these arepas before they go cold.’
‘For progress we must have strength, and for strength we must have good food,’ exclaimed Don Balsal, and he put a whole arepa into his mouth. He closed his eyes in ecstasy, like a Frenchman who has discovered a new and wonderful wine, and allowed the warm egg-yolk to trickle about the inside of his mouth. He chewed to release the flavour of the maize, and it seemed to him to waft about the inside of his head like smoke. ‘I am going to get drunk on this,’ he proclaimed happily.
Concepcion and Guzman slept soundly that night on the straw petate mats, using cushions from the jeep as pillows, and the padded jacket as a blanket. They awoke in the first chilly light of morning to find that they were sharing their warmth with Don Balsal’s chicken, a fleabitten cat, and a shorthaired dog with one missing eye. Concepcion breathed deeply and said, ‘The air is so clean that it hurts.’
‘I bet that the river does not stink hereabouts,’ said Guzman. ‘I bet that one can drink the water from it. I am going to go out and have a wash in it.’
He was standing shivering in the freezing water, gingerly splashing himself, when Don Balsal stood above him on the river bank and said gravely, ‘It is all right to pretend that this is the Jordan and that you are being baptised, but to wash upstream of a village is antisocial. You should go downstream where no one takes the water.’
‘Forgive my ignorance,’ said Guzman, hastily climbing out of the stream, so that his feet became instantly dirty again in the mud. He towelled himself and then looked up at Don Balsal, who was regarding his with an ironic eye. ‘Father, can I make a confession to you? Where is the church?’
Balsal gestured expansively. ‘The whole world is a church. You can make confession here.’
Guzman knelt in the mud before the priest, and began, ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned . . .’
‘With me you can leave that bit out,’ said Don Balsal, ‘let’s get straight to the point.’
‘I allowed my mother to die in an asylum, I caused the death of a priest by giving away his concealment to the security forces, I caused the death of prostitute and the death of her murderer, I closed many schools, I sold a cloister to be used as a supermarket, I impregnated my maid, I avoided blessing the pious widows, I have often treated Concepcion very badly, I destroyed a gift that she made to me, I have negligently lost my only son, and I have performed my duties poorly.’
‘I didn’t know we had any supermarkets,’ said Don Balsal.
‘I have sinned very grievously, Father.’
‘Tell me, my son, are all these allegations against yourself true, or is this the assault of an irreverent sense of humour?’
‘Father, it is true. Forgive me Father.’
Don Balsal looked down at him sternly. ‘As a man, I say that you ought to be shot. As a priest, I forgive you. Go and sin no more.’
‘Do I have no penance?’
Don Balsal scratched the stubble on his chin and glanced up at the sun as it lifted above the pristine snow of the sierra. ‘Just do something useful with the rest of your life. If you say you have lost a child, go and find some others who need to be found. If you have taken life, then give life back. If you have sold what you should not have sold, then buy for someone else something that you do not need to buy.’
Guzman digested this verdict in silence, and then asked, ‘Father, would you marry me to Concepcion?’
But Concepcion would have none of it. ‘I am not mad,’ she announced, when the idea was proposed to her later. ‘If we were married legally by a mayor and religiously by a priest, you would only take me for granted. And as far as I am concerned, my cadenay, we have been married in fact already for many years, so that this idea is an insult. I will only consent to be married to you in the fashion of my mother’s people, who always live together first, which is only common sense.’
And so it was that they mounted a hill, and Guzman listened as Concepcion proclaimed to the wilderness, ‘I dedicate myself to the moon and this man to the sun. I will nourish him as I do myself, I will take the same care of him as I do of myself, I will give him the use of my fertility.’ She turned to him and put her arms about his neck, ‘There, my cadenay, we are married.’
‘Don’t I have to say anything?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘This way I am married to you, but you are not married to me, the same as always. That is how I like it.’ She took his hand and laid the palm of it upon her stomach. ‘You are a typical man,’ she said, affecting an expression of resignation. ‘It was not just your health that was restored by Dr Tapabalazo.’
An expression of incredulity passed over his face, and abruptly he fell to his knees, pressing his ear against her to listen for a heartbeat.
There is another story concerning Concepcion and Guzman. It tells how, having searched for Cristobal even as far as Cochadebajo de los Gatos, Guzman sold the estates that he had inherited, and at night scoured the slums and sewers of the capital for the forgotten children. How he saved some from addiction, prostitution, crime, and early death, and lost many others who could not resist being drawn back to the way of life that had clawed them into bondage. How he struggled with sceptical judges and corrupted mayors to arrest and imprison the policemen and the vigilantes who were shooting the children at night and lobbing grenades and poisoned food down manhole covers so that the sewers filled with tiny skeletons. How he petitioned President Garcilaso, enlisted the support of Dionisio Vivo and General Hernando Montes Sosa, raised money in London, Paris, and New York, and found himself back in the care of Dr Tertuliano Tomás Kaiser Wilhelm Tebas de Tapabalazo, who removed two bullets from his shoulder and another from his stomach. With paternal pride Dr Tapabalazo admired the tidy scars of his previous operation, and agreed to become a visiting doctor to the stately orphanage that had been opened near Arcabuco, with Don Balsal as its principal. Balsal would patrol the grounds with his shotgun, for which he now had some ammunition, and sprayed with buckshot several jeeploads of the coca hooligans who had turned up in the hope of abducting the little girls, until they gave up and never returned. The children roamed about the countryside, innocently doing things for which they would have been arrested in the capital, and some of them stayed on to become staff. The cholos, reluctant and suspicious, drifted in very slowly to grow vegetables that they had never seen before, and some of their children arrived unannounced in the classrooms, demanding in Quechua to learn how to read in Castilian.
Concepcion, happily the mother to uncounted children, including her own, grew old with dignity, planting flowers that would attract hummingbirds, and steadfastly continuing to refuse to marry Guzman, who, to the day of his death, never learned of the havoc caused by his first attempt to save the nation’s souls.
49 Parlanchina’s Warning
CARMEN ROLLED OUT of her hammock before her husband. She had not slept very well because there had been something unidentifiable that had been worrying her. It was like an insistent voice, just out of earshot. Now that the sun was venturing above the horizon it seemed as though every animal in the canopy of the jungle was competing to express its joy and terror at the prospect of a new day’s survival. A troupe of howler monkeys was whooping near by, a jaguar was coughing, the crickets were tuning up their sawmill, and fl
ocks of scarlet macaws were flying overhead on their daily mission to the claybanks where they would swallow kaolin in order to counteract the poisons in their diet of bitter fruits.
Carmen revived the embers of the fire with a fan made of woven palm, and set a pot of coffee directly upon them. She squatted before it to warm her hands, and then sliced a plantain which she would fry for breakfast. She walked out of the hut and threw the skin to the sow, who heaved herself out of her scrape with a grunt, and bolted the food with appreciation. Carmen ran her fingers through her snowy hair in order to free it of the night, and went over to Parlanchina’s grave in the clearing before the hut. As she rearranged the twigs and decorations, she talked to her daughter.
‘Gwubba,’ she said, ‘how are you? And why do you come to Aurelio and not to me? Gwubba, I have been having troubles in my mind. Perhaps you would come to Aurelio and tell him what it is, so that he can tell me, and then I can know. Something is wrong because there is too much peace. Has the world stopped happening, or have I died, Gwubba?’
She contemplated the grave where the white bones of her exquisite daughter lay muddled with those of Federico and her pet ocelot, and out in the forest a bird called with a sound that could have been Parlanchina laughing in the days when she was alive and always talking too much. Carmen’s eyes misted with the sorrow that had never left her even though she knew that Parlanchina had married Federico in the afterworld and had borne his child. ‘Without you I feel a terrible loneliness,’ she explained to the grave. ‘You were more like the sun and the moon and the wind than they themselves, and your hammock is empty, and your little cat does not chase butterflies and steal things from the meathooks.’
Carmen wept. If only the earth of the grave would heave up and Parlanchina rise laughing from the soil. If only she would stride through the trees with her hair brushing about her waist, imitating the calls of the animals and terrifying the patrols of the Jungle Rangers, with their burdens of backpacks and machine guns, and their terrible thirst for death. Carmen knew that Parlanchina still did these things, but only Aurelio could see her. Carmen could not help but take this as favouritism, even though Aurelio had explained the true reasons, and so she felt injured in the heart.
Carmen returned to the hut and took the coffee from the fire. She poured some into a gourd to let it cool a little, and fetched her little scrap of broken mirror from its concealment in the palms. She breathed on it and cleaned it on the fabric of the hammock, and then she tried to discern her face amid the pattern of scratches. She saw her white curls that had once been red, and the lines of age that had divided her youth into a quilt of a face. The lips that had been full and sensual now had grooves in them, and felt dry even when moistened with her tongue. Her eyes seemed to have lost themselves somewhere in the labyrinth of time, and looked back at her as though they belonged to another. The velvety blackness of her skin seemed now to have a pallor of grey. She gazed at herself for so long that her own image became incomprehensible, and she put the mirror away. She went over to where Aurelio lay sleeping and saw that time had reduced him also; he seemed smaller than before, and his long black Indian’s hair caught streaks of silver in the light. She understood that she loved him even more now than in the past, despite his diminishment towards death, and she realised with surprise that he too loved her more than when they had been young together, and beautiful. More tears came to her eyes, because that is what happens when one suddenly perceives a miracle amid the commonplace. She settled down with her gourd of coffee and relit the cigar she had been smoking the night before. ‘I am waiting for you to awake,’ she said to her sleeping husband.
‘Why do we still love each other?’ she asked him as they breakfasted on the platano, and Aurelio licked the grease from his fingers whilst he thought about an answer.
‘We have always sought happiness more than we have avoided suffering. And we have kept busy together so much that whilst we were not looking we have become each other’s soul. Perhaps you have an answer to your own question?’
Carmen tossed some piassaba on the fire to revive it, and said, ‘I love you so much that when I look at you I do not see your face.’
‘It is bad to talk about it. It is better just to do it. I think that when you talk about love it is because you are afraid to lose it. Remember that I am an Indian.’
‘I am black,’ she said, ‘and it is permitted for me to talk about it, and to be afraid sometimes. Will we do the coca today?’
Aurelio nodded, ‘I have brought the shells.’
Carmen went to the little plantation because only women may pick the coca, and Aurelio built a fire because only men may calcify the shells. He had just placed them on the smouldering lattice of branches, and was sucking the end of his coca pestle when Parlanchina came up behind him and wrapped her hair around his eyes. ‘Look, Papacito,’ she exclaimed, ‘it is night-time.’
Aurelio sneezed because the hair had tickled his nose when he inhaled, and Parlanchina protested, rubbing the pretended mucus on his shoulder. ‘Have you come for a story, Gwubba, or have you come just to be a nuisance?’ asked her father.
‘I have come to tell you two pieces of news,’ she replied, ‘but you will receive neither until you have explained the coca to me.’
‘Again?’
‘Again.’
‘It was Pachamama who gave us the coca and taught us how to use it,’ began Aurelio, ‘Pachamama who has many other names. She gave it to us so that we would stop being animals and become civilised. No one who does not have coca is civilised. Dionisio tells me that there were people who were called “Greeks”, and they said that they were given wine in order to become civilised, and no one who does not have wine is civilised, so perhaps wine is the same thing as coca in a different form, who knows? When we became civilised we lived by the mountain of silver, Potosí, and we learned how to make things out of silver and became even more civilised, but then the Spanish came and took the mountain away, and offended Pachamama and made her weak, so that now there is less snow upon the mountains than before, and the lakes on the altiplano dried up and turned to salt, and the people who stayed became stupid and everyone else left forever. You understand that the mountain contained the people’s spirits, and these spirits did not want to come out, because life is hard, and neither did they want to go back, because death is hard. When the Spanish took the mountain away, the spirits had to live in other mountains and my people became dispersed.’
Parlanchina sat upon the ground with her ocelot curled up in her arms, its feet in the air, and asked, ‘Will you tell me more about Pachamama?’
‘She told us not to wear shoes too often, because she liked to feel our feet upon her body. In the beginning she was the sea because that is all there was, and she remembered the future, and so it was that she gave birth to possibility. And Pachamama spun nine worlds, and this is why women spin in order to be like her, and this is why I turn when I am thinking, because I am spinning my thoughts. And Pachamama bled between her legs and became fertile, and her blood became gold, although it is also said that gold is the sweat of the sun, and she bore us so that we might take care of her as a child always cares for its old mother.
‘And she gave us coca, which is why only women may cultivate it, and now I shall tell you about the poporro.’ Aurelio held up his coca gourd, with its bulging base and long thin neck, encrusted upon the outside with the yellowed mixture of lime and crushed leaves. ‘You may look at this and think that it resembles the parts of a man, and that is why only a man may use coca, but you would be wrong. This bulge is the womb of a woman, and this neck is her passage. It is this pestle which is the part of a man, because it goes in and out and works its magic on the inside. So women honour Pachamama by spinning, and men do so by pounding coca in the poporro. A man may not marry without this, for it makes him calm and fortifies him for work, so that he may care for his woman and not be tempted to strike her, which is a great evil, and that is why it civilises us. But when the whit
e man takes coca, he takes out the essence, and becomes mad. And now the shells are ready; look, they are completely white.’
Parlanchina watched as Aurelio flicked the shells out of the cinders and scooped them into a large gourd with its neck removed. He poured water into it from another gourd, and the smoke of the chemical reaction billowed out. ‘Pachamama showed us this,’ he said. ‘Without this lime there is no goodness in the coca. Now tell me your news.’
She teased him, ‘No, I want another story first. Tell me how the jaguar got its spots.’
Realising that she was trying to keep him in suspense, Aurelio said, ‘No, I shall tell you the story about the two worms. Once there was a woman worm who met her friend under the floor of my hut, and I heard them talking. One said to the other, “Where is your husband?” and the other replied, “He has gone fishing.’”
Parlanchina screwed up her nose to ponder this story, and then realised that it was a joke. She took the paw of her sleepy ocelot and squeezed it so that the claws unsheathed themselves, and she reached over and scratched Aurelio’s face with them. The ocelot growled in protest, pulling his paw away from Parlanchina’s grasp. Aurelio took his daughter’s nose in between two fingers and squeezed. ‘Gwubba, I am not letting go until you tell me this news.’
She tried to bite the heel of his palm, and failed, ‘Let go, and then I will tell.’
‘Swear.’
‘I swear it.’ He released her, and she said, ‘Federico is dying. Whenever I see him he is more faded than before.’
‘Federico is already dead.’
‘But he is dying all over again. What can I do?’
‘He is dying because he is being reborn. One day he will go altogether, and you will know that he has come back to the world as a child. Perhaps the same will happen to you one day. Where is your child?’
‘I left her with Mama in the coca plantation, because I want her to know her grandmother. Papacito, I am very sad.’