‘Has Hectoro taken a fourth wife? Has the machine broken down? Are we fetching more tractors?’
And the General said, ‘You are on the right track, cabrón. We are going to build a wall across the valley in front of the city.’
‘What?’ I cried. ‘More labours?’
I was aghast because apart from helping to fetch the tractors I had helped Dionisio and Profesor Luis to build the great map of the world in the marsh, and I had had enough of breaking my bones and tearing my hands. I was even more perturbed when I discovered the reasons for the wall, and I ran down to the plaza, unable to believe my ears.
‘Why should we build a wall because we have been told to do so by the purported ghost of Aurelio’s adopted daughter?’ I asked, and all I heard in reply was nonsense. Sergio said, ‘It is because this time the gods will be unable to help us,’ and I exclaimed, ‘What do you mean by “this time”?’ Misael told me, ‘It is because circumstances have confused the saints.’ Remedios said, ‘We need fortifications,’ and I demanded, ‘Why? Are we to expect an invasion?’ And Dolores the whore observed, ‘Let the invaders be rich and horny, and I am content.’
Against this farrago of nonsense I was unable to make myself heard, what with Don Salvador the False Priest quoting obscenities in Latin and the Conde waving his sword about and declaring that he would bathe the invaders in rivers of blood, and Father Garcia solemnly explaining that the Archangel Sandalphon was deeply concerned for our safety. Don Emmanuel said, ‘It will not do any harm to keep us all busy; one’s hands should always be occupied,’ and Felicidad spat on the ground and said, ‘It is how your hands are occupied that grieves me.’
So we built the wall. I was glad for once of the conquistadors brought back to life by Aurelio. Normally they swagger about in their rusty armour, drinking to excess, tripping over the recumbent jaguars and causing distress to the women with their persistent oaths and molestations, and on top of that they have the vacant expressions of cretins and they dribble. Aurelio says that it is on account of their long freezing over the centuries and that we should be patient with them, but I have no tolerance any more. Except that now that we were occupied upon a military project that was comprehensible to them, they worked like slaves.
We brought enormous quantities of cement and sand from Ipasueño, which Doña Constanza paid for, and I lost count of the number of times we went backwards and forwards to Ipasueño with recuas of mules. I lost all the weight that I had put on since I had been cared for by Ena and Lena. We built up a wall three metres high and two metres deep that stretched right across the valley, with a gatehouse at the centre for ingress and exit, and a low arch to permit the flow of the river. We had problems at the ends because an invader could just have scrambled up the slopes and circumvented our battlements, and so we build it up along the mountainsides until it was so difficult to build any further that we reckoned that, if we could not go any higher, neither could anyone else climb round it.
Just when I believed that our months of toil were finished and I was thinking that there would be a great fiesta to celebrate, it was made known that the Conde had declared that in his long experience such a wall was useless without a moat, because one could bring ladders and grappling irons up to it. So the work began all over again, and we dug a moat in the silt and piled the spoil up against the wall so that the stone would be protected from missiles. Profesor Luis calculated the contours of the canal and it filled to perfection from the river just as soon as we lifted the wooden gates. Doña Constanza declared that she now understood that the canal to her swimming pool would have worked perfectly well if the work had been properly done. It appears that she has never been explicitly told that her pet project was sabotaged deliberately. To everyone else this is common knowledge and a reliable source of laughter.
‘Fiesta time,’ I thought, and was thinking up plans for a concert by the town band. I wrote a marinera and a jarabe in my head and was wondering who I could ask to make up a joropo dancing party, when Aurelio announced to all and sundry that he wished to conduct an experiment.
Aurelio is an Aymara, and for centuries his people were under the tutelage of the Incas. To this day every Aymara speaks some Quechua, the language imposed by the emperors. Aurelio said that he wished to see if it was possible to build walls in the ancient style, with polygonal blocks fitting so perfectly that one could insert not even a knife between them. He observed that it could do no harm to build the wall even higher. Hectoro proposed dismantling the temple of Viracocha and reutilising the blocks on the wall, but the man is a philistine even though he pretends to read so much. His book is always held upside down, and he moves his lips.
To my amazement there was general consent to this idea; Dionisio told me that all of them owed their very existence to Aurelio, and were willing to please him. It seemed that he wanted us to gather in the plaza by the axle-pole, and on the appointed evening we trooped down there, even Ena and Lena, who were reconciled with me by that time because I had apologised.
There were four great fires built, and Aurelio appeared dressed all in white, the colours of a witch amongst his people. He spoke to us, saying, ‘In the days of my ancestors one made walls like this; firstly one poured a fluid over a rock to make it soft like clay, and one put it into place and fashioned it. Then one poured over it another liquid and it was made back into stone, and this is the cause that Inca walls are as they are. There is nothing I want you to do tonight except to stay here, for your presence alone will help whilst I bargain with the ancestors for the recipes.’
Having said that, he walked straight through one of the fires. A gasp came up out of the people because all of us thought that he would be burned. But he came out unscathed and walked straight through the fire opposite. We gasped again, but once more he came through untouched. He mumbled loudly the whole time, and he continued walking through the four fires, one after the other, until the miracle became veritably tedious. I amused myself by looking at the paintmarks on the moon.
Eventually he came for the last time out of the flames with his clothes covered in soot and the soles of his feet apparently smouldering. He coughed, and said, ‘Thank you, that is all.’
With a strong sense of anticlimax we all went home, for it seemed as though nothing was to happen. But a week later Aurelio came back from the jungle with four mules laden with sacks, and he appropriated Dolores’ cauldron that she uses normally to make guarapol at candombles. I do not know what grisly objects went into the concoction, because they all seemed shrivelled and without identity, but I went down to watch him once and saw him swig a mouthful of rum. He spat it over the brew and it caught fire most spectacularly. He also blew a great deal of cigar-smoke over it and pounded his coca-gourd relentlessly with that hypnotically rapid and deft delving of the pestle.
I was not there when he poured some of the fluid over a rock and made it plastic, but the General came up the hill and informed me of it breathlessly. I thought, ‘O no, the work begins all over again,’ and I was right.
The most immense boulders were levered off the mountainside and gathered from the plateau to be brought up in the lift. We had to construct a crane to raise the boulders up onto the wall, because we could not do it the traditional way, by making an earthen ramp, since the moat was in the way on one side, and there were houses on the other. Aurelio poured fluid over the rocks and we beat them into shape with shovels, and then he hardened them with another fluid. He was so pleased that even I, having worked my fingers to shreds and my muscles to leather, was glad to see him dancing in little circles with his hands in the air. Normally he is dignity itself.
And what do we have to show for it? A colossal defence made by request of a ghost to defend us against an implausible invasion that cannot happen in the modern world. But there were some good consequences. It blocks the wind that funnels down the valley, and one’s clothes do not disappear any more from the washing line, and sail out over the plateau; all the rocks were gathered from the m
ountainsides, reducing the chances of avalanche, and from the plateau and the andenes, facilitating agriculture; it is good to stand on the top and watch the sunset; there are good fish in the moat and some very edible waterfowl; it proved definitively the usefulness of the tractors; and we had a formidable fiesta, after which Antoine and Françoise congratulated me upon the euphony of my two new compositions, and the town awarded me the Supremely Elevated Order Of The Apparatus for services to architecture and musical education. I was as drunk as a German, and I trust that my speech of acceptance was as witty and apposite as I think I remember it to have been. Ena and Lena giggle every time I mention it.
54 Of Death And Returning
JOSEF DIED BECAUSE a pregnant woman looked at him when he had been bitten by a snake. It was not Francesca’s fault that she looked at him, because she had no way of knowing that they were bringing him up from the plateau in the great lift just as she was passing by to see whether or not she had caught any shrimps in the wicker basket. Nobody blamed Francesca, therefore, but for quite a while she felt deeply guilty.
Josef had been extremely unlucky as he swung his machete in the banana plantation. Normally a snake would have made itself scarce, but this one lay low until the machete gashed its flank, and, as if by reflex, it sank its fangs into Josefs foot and injected all its venom. Snakes are habitually parsimonious with their poison; they parcel it out carefully, innoculating their victims with just the right amount to paralyse them and begin the internal process of predigestion. Animals that they intend merely to scare away do not normally receive much poison at all, or just enough to make them more careful in the future. If snakes were humans they would be the kind of people who save up small coins and put them into investment accounts, eat chocolates only after lunch on Sundays, believe in swift corporal punishment to deter criminals, are sceptical about the value of social services, and give pocket handkerchiefs for Christmas presents. But Josef’s snake was in a state of such rage and pain that it vengefully administered a legful of lethal anaesthetic, crawled away to die an embittered death, and was gratefully consumed by ants.
Josef turned very pale, so that his open black face became grey, and he sat down on the grass to await with mounting trepidation the traditional remedy. Sergio and Pedro the Hunter tossed a coin, and Pedro lost. He wanted to toss again, but Josef said, ‘Come on, cabrón, I forgive you in advance. Let us just finish it.’
Pedro took his machete from its sheath and tested the edge for sharpness. A thin cut appeared in his thumb, and he knew that it was well-honed enough. Pedro was old, but very tall and lithe, and it gave Josef confidence to think that such a strong hunter, dressed in animal skins, a man skilled in blood, would be doing the job with well-practised hands.
‘Close your eyes, amigo,’ said Pedro, and Josef shut them so tight that he felt that they would pop backwards into his head.
Some say that bone-pain is the worst pain that can be experienced, and others say that it is childbirth or the pain of a heart that stops suddenly. To Josef the slice of the blade seemed to crash into him like a hurtling boulder or a bullet. He threw his head back with a jerk, and a scream that never emerged from his mouth filled his skull and then exploded into the rest of his body. Whilst he was submerged beneath this avalanche, too shaken to think or to feel, Pedro raised the machete high above his head and, with absolute accuracy, completed the amputation with a second blow.
Josef felt his stomach dissolve, looked at his hands to see them shaking like leaves in the wind, fought against his nausea, and vomited. He had never previously known that one could not only experience agony, but become it. Sergio quickly bound the stump tightly in a tourniquet twisted out of the sleeve of his shirt, and Pedro urinated into the bottom of his mochila in order to place it over the wound and, according to the old wisdom, keep it from infection.
Josef fainted (‘It was from the heat, and not from the pain,’ he explained later), and Pedro hauled him over his shoulders as if he were a slain brocket. He ran towards the lift, with Sergio running in pursuit, mopping his brow with the remains of his shirt and succumbing to a kind of sympathetic post-operative shock. Near the top of the cliff Francesca leaned over to admire the view, and inadvertently caused Josef to die. The latter opened his eyes to see a pregnant woman looking at him, and knew that it was all over.
In the city there was panic. Aurelio was nowhere to be found, since both of his apparent selves were combined into one self for the purpose of bargaining with the gods over the matter of Federico’s disappearance, and Dionisio Vivo, who had the reputation of being able to deal with anything as long as it was spectacular, was in Santa Maria Virgen, making love to the two sisters who tended to the needs of his car.
Josef was brought to the whorehouse, since he wished to die in the same place as had given him the greatest happiness in life. His whole body was visibly swelling, and a great fever was breaking out on his brow. Remedios came in and said to Pedro, ‘You will have to cure him; with Aurelio absent, you are the nearest we have to a snake-doctor.’
Pedro shook his head sadly and looked down into Remedios’ incalculably brown eyes. ‘I know only the secretos for animals. If Josef were an animal, it would be different.’
‘Try the one for a horse,’ suggested Dolores the whore in her smoky voice, ‘the man is almost a stallion.’
Pedro knelt down and muttered into Josef’s ear, but then he stood up and said, ‘No spirits left me.’
‘Try the one for a pig,’ said Fulgencia Astiz, the leader of the fanatical women who had made a cult out of bearing the children of Dionisio Vivo, ‘I hear that humans taste of pork.’
‘I spoke once to a member of the tribe that ate the first bishop of Retreta, and he said that the word of his fathers was that the bishop tasted of veal,’ offered Misael.
‘Bishops taste different, everyone knows that. It is on account of their rich diet,’ said Leticia Aragon, whose eyes were violet on this day.
‘Forget it,’ moaned Josef, ‘just call Father Garcia. I am going to die because I saw Francesca looking at me.’
Outside the door came a wail of repentance and regret, since Francesca was out there, not wishing to compound his affliction by coming in and looking at him again.
Father Garcia entered in a hurry, fully armed with Holy Water, rum to serve as communion wine, and empanadas to supply the place of Holy Wafers. With him was Don Salvador, the False Priest, who bore his new parallel text of Catullus that Dionisio had found for him in the capital on one of his trips to see the editor of La Prensa.
‘Everybody must leave,’ announced Father Garcia, ‘I am going to hear his confession.’
‘I will confess in public,’ said Josef, ‘since I am not ashamed of my sins.’
‘If you are not ashamed, then God will not pardon you and you will go to hell,’ remonstrated Father Garcia.
‘You misjudge God,’ returned Josef. ‘Before I sin I always go down on my knees and ask God how much He minds, and He has never prevented me.’
Father Garcia’s lugubrious face lightened with a smile, and he said, ‘Let us begin the confession.’
‘I once fucked the niece of the policeman in Chiriguana after she had been sold to Pedro the grocer, and she was only twelve years old but she fucked like a rabbit, so I did it many more times. I threw a bottle of Anis Ocho Hermanos over Hectoro during the battle of Doña Barbara, which was a sinful waste of money and good liquor, and it stung his eyes. I once gave a spoonful of rum to a crying baby to make it shut up, and it nearly died. I stole a reel of barbed wire from the hacienda of Don Hugh of Chiriguana when we still lived down on the plain. I took an unbranded calf from Don Emmanuel and raised it as my own. I spent so much time thinking about dying that sometimes I forgot to live, and when I was very young I masturbated myself every day for three years until a woman took pity on me and made me into a man. Apart from that I have done only one or two bad things every day.’
Father Garcia absolved him and administered the last ri
tes amid an increasingly oppressive atmosphere of piety and impending doom, and Don Salvador solemnly intoned the whole of Catullus’ poem about the death of his Lesbia’s sparrow.
Ten hours later Josefs fever was causing him periods of delirium, and his body was formidably bloated. He awoke from his dreams and beckoned urgently to Father Garcia, who leaned down to catch his words: ‘In Chiriguana I paid Don Ramón the cura, for a proper burial in a coffin and three masses. Will you do it even though I have not paid any money to you?’
‘I will do it on behalf of the Church,’ said Father Garcia gravely, ‘which has already received the money.’
Josef beckoned again and once more Father Garcia leaned down: ‘Will I be able to fuck in heaven as much as I want? Because otherwise I wish you to arrange for me to go somewhere else.’
‘A priest has limited powers of negotiation,’ observed Garcia, ‘but it is my opinion that if one could not fuck in heaven, then it would not be heaven, which is a contradiction in terms and therefore impossible. It would be a metaphysical oxymoron. That is something I learned from you, as it was always your opinion.’
Josef looked gratified, and then murmured, ‘I have a last wish. I want to be buried with the rest of my leg, and I want to die drunk.’
Josef expired at midnight, deeply comatose from the rum, a puro cigar still smouldering between his fingers. Out of love and respect the people left him in the middle of the floor whilst they drank and whored, and others came in and out bringing burial presents. Dolores brought a bowl of Pollo de un Hombre Verdadero as tribute to his virility, Felicidad came in with tears in her eyes, leaving him the black sequinned stockings that used to make him drool and arouse him to ribaldry, Sergio brought him a decorated gourd from which to drink firewater in paradise, Hectoro brought him four pitillos crammed with the best marijuana, and Doña Constanza brought him her ancient copy of Vogue with the tantalising pictures of semi-naked white women in impractical clothing. Tomás brought him coca leaves to chew in case there were mountains to climb in heaven, Gloria brought him four bullets to commemorate his role in driving the Army away from the old village, and Pedro brought in a stillborn puppy from one of his hunting dogs, to help him in the celestial chase.