The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzmán Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Louis de Bernières

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1 His Eminence, Tormented By Demons, Resolves To Save His Soul

  2 Ena And The Mexican Musicologist (1)

  3 Of The New Restaurant And The New Priest

  4 Ena And The Mexican Musicologist (2)

  5 The Sermon Of Father Garcia To The Jaguars From The Top Of An Obelisk

  6 Ena And The Mexican Musicologist (3)

  7 The Submission Of The Holy Office To His Eminence (1)

  8 How Love Became Possible In Cochadebajo de los Gatos

  9 The Submission Of The Holy Office To His Eminence (2)

  10 Of Dionisio Vivo And Profesor Luis

  11 The Submission Of The Holy Office To His Eminence (3)

  12 How We Brought The Tractors From Chiriguana To Cochadebajo de los Gatos

  13 In Which His Eminence Makes A Fateful Choice

  14 The Monologue Of The Conde Pompeyo Xavier De Estremadura Walking In The Sierra

  15 Concepcion

  16 In Which His Excellency President Veracruz Wins The General Election Without Rigging It Very Much (1)

  17 How Dionisio Inadvertently Started The Battle Of Doña Barbara

  18 In Which His Excellency President Veracruz Wins The General Election Without Rigging It Very Much (2)

  19 Monsignor Rechin Anquilar

  20 The Battle Of Doña Barbara

  21 In Which Cristobal Confounds His Eminence With Pertinent Questions, And Monsignor Rechin Anquilar Imparts Sombre News

  22 What Really Happened In Rinconondo

  23 The Beast And The Three-Hundred-Year-Old Man

  24 Return To Rinconondo

  25 A Further Extract From General Fuerte’s Notebooks

  26 The Massacre At Rinconondo

  27 The Lieutenant Who Loved Redheads

  28 In Which His Excellency President Veracruz Fiddles While Medio-Magdalena Burns

  29 Concepcion Buys His Eminence A Present

  30 Dionisio Unexpectedly Acquires Two More Lovers On The Way To See His Family

  31 The Erotica Symphony

  32 Dionisio’s Continuing Adventures On The Way To Valledupar

  33 General Hernando Montes Sosa Confides In His Son

  34 Cristobal

  PART TWO

  35 In Which The Presidential Couple Enjoy The Delights Of Paris

  36 Dionisio Receives Sad News

  37 Dr Tebas De Tapabalazo

  38 Of The New Albigensian Crusade

  39 The Spectacular And Wonderful Tapabalazo Teratoma

  40 In Which The Monsignor Encounters One Or Two Difficulties

  41 An Apocalypse Of Embarrassment Strikes The City (1)

  42 The Hummingbird

  43 An Apocalypse Of Embarrassment Strikes The City (2)

  44 St Thomas Is Inspired To Mournfulness

  45 Don Emmanuel’s Patriotic Concert

  46 How Aurelio Became Himself

  47 St Thomas Recalls

  48 Of Concepcion And Dominic Guzman

  49 Parlanchina’s Warning

  50 Sibila

  51 Parlanchina’s Lament

  52 In Conspectu Tormentorum

  53 The Mexican Musicologist Recalls The Building Of The Wall

  54 Of Death And Returning

  55 Sibila Retrieves Her Fallen Crown And Dons Her Robe Of Light

  56 Letters

  57 In Which Felicidad’s Gyrating Backside Provokes Hostilities

  58 The Council Of War And The Cripple’s Atonement

  59 In Which Dionisio Humanely Miscalculates

  60 Don Salvador The False Priest Reveals A Secret

  61 Father Garcia Is Saved By St Dominic

  62 The Discussion In The Whorehouse

  63 Strategic Manoeuvres And A Pleasant Surprise

  64 The Epiphany Of The False Priest

  65 The Pit

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Louis de Bernières is the best-selling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book in 1995. His most recent book is Notwithstanding.

  ALSO BY LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

  The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts

  Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

  Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World

  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

  Red Dog

  Birds Without Wings

  A Partisan’s Daughter

  Notwithstanding

  This book is dedicated to my family,

  for their unfailing faith and enthusiasm;

  to Caroline, for her fund of stories

  and her luminous presence; and to all those who are

  persecuted for daring to think for themselves.

  The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman

  Louis de Bernières

  Prologue

  These events transpired just after the time when the most powerful soft-drinks company in the world pulled off the greatest feat of advertising in modern history.

  Fired with the spirit of corporate enterprise, enthused with the idea of refreshing the whole of mankind, and not content that their famous logo was scrolled in neon from Red Square to Tierra del Fuego, they bought into a joint Russian/American space shot, and proclaimed themselves from the heavens in a manner unknown since God Himself set his bow in the sky.

  They launched two satellites, one at each pole, to project their name upon the eternal snows so that it was visible in the telescopes of distant races and strange civilisations, who accordingly changed their name for our planet. In the Arctic there evolved new species of red polar bears, foxes, and seals, which were then too conspicuous to leave their boundaries of light and venture into the whiteness, and in the Antarctic the same effect was observed upon emperor penguins.

  But this message was as nothing compared to their transformation of the moon. Hundreds of silver-suited workers with post-graduate degrees in astrophysics and low-gravity hydraulics drove their specially designed paint-spray vehicles between hundreds of kilometres of carefully placed markers, until below upon the earth could be seen the company name resplendent, fluorescent, and unmistakable.

  Anthropologists set out in droves to the remotest corners of mountain and rainforest in order to gather data upon the effect of this lunar metamorphosis upon primitive thinking, and returned disappointed. Even the Navantes, the Cusicuari, the Kogi, the Acahuatecs, were familiar with the logo that could be found hanging from trees in areas presumed to be unexplored, that could be seen above the doorways of brush huts and painted upon the rocks of Mount Aconcagua.

  But with the passage of time even the specially formulated paint could no longer stand the conditions of our satellite. Sprayed with lunar dust, battered by meteorites, expanded and contracted by extremes of temperature, the writing began to break up until it appeared that the face of the moon was smeared with blood. People would look up at the sky of night, and shudder.

  Part One

  Hoy, sin miedo que libre escandalice,

  puede hablar el ingenio, asegurado

  de que mayor poder le atemorice.

  En otros siglos pudo ser pecado

  severo estudio, y la verdad desnuda,

  y romper el silencio el bien hablado.

  Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645)

  (‘These days, without fear that his freedom will offend, an intelligent man may speak, safe from the intimidation of the more powerful.r />
  In other centuries rigorous criticism, the naked truth, and the eloquent man’s breaking of silence, could have been crimes.’)

  1 His Eminence, Tormented By Demons, Resolves To Save His Soul

  ONCE AGAIN, CARDINAL Dominic Trujillo Guzman felt a pang like that of childbirth spear him in the belly, and he doubled over, clutching himself and moaning. As always when this happened, his only thoughts were of the guilt of his life. In his anguish it was as if ancient coffers opened before his eyes, but instead of overflowing with gold doubloons, louis d’or, silver crucifixes encrusted with rubies, there spilled out demons.

  His Eminence knew all his parade of demons by heart; they were an infernal pantheon that, as he lay there upon the stone floor gaping with anguish, passed before him in a monstrous parody of a Holy Week procession, mocking him for his faults and rejoicing.

  At the head of the diabolical rout was the creature with the two contending heads in loud dispute. The necks were indeed swanlike, but their length and flexibility merely made it easier for those vile mouths to dart and bite at each other, as with kisses grown too passionate. ‘Vatican Two, Vatican Two,’ one of the heads was screaming, and the other was shouting, equally shrill, ‘Tradition, tradition,’ as though that was all there was to that time in 1968 when His Eminence had attended the very first conference of Latin American bishops in Medellin. He was a powerful man even then, and he had gone away in disgust, determined to do away altogether with the influence of Liberation Theology in his own episcopacy. To be sure he had tried reason, persuasion, and the quoting of precedents, but that did not prevent his priests from abandoning their worldly goods and disappearing into the backlands with only a donkey and a wooden crucifix to stir up the discontent of the poor, fill their minds with economic theories that had nothing to do with the maintenance of churches and cathedrals, and everything to do with dispossessing those very rich people whose generosity it was that ensured that the Virgin should be represented by silver statues. ‘Nothing is too good for God,’ His Eminence would say, only to have some parish priest retort without respect (and employing some nauseatingly stereotypical formula), that, ‘Loving one’s neighbour is a matter of praxis.’ His Eminence recalled without nostalgia the bitter arguments that had so often degenerated into unecclesiastical personal insult as he had dismissed a poor priest as a ‘slogan-monger’ only to be dubbed in return ‘an oligarchic parasite whose fat belly is full of the bread of the lowly’.

  He remembered his early years when life in the Church had been one of tranquillity and routine, a kind of dreamlike state perfumed with incense and lulled with chant. He remembered how he had, one by one, got rid of his turbulent clergy. There had been that one who had left anyway, and had got killed in a skirmish when the National Army had surprised a party of Communists; and there was Don Ramón, who he had browbeaten in repeated interviews until he had forced a promise that he would never again allow a political opinion to pass his lips.

  Nowadays there were no parish priests with donkeys and wooden crucifixes. Instead there were plump, jolly priests who drove land-cruisers, who wore gold rings inlaid with the cross, and everything was to his satisfaction, except that when he suffered agony like this, the other side of the argument always presented itself to him, and he recalled that in many villages there were no priests at all anymore. In those places people made a cult of the Black Virgin, begging her intercession even in the most un-Christian projects, and there was no sanctioned marriage; men got women pregnant and then disappeared, leaving behind them improbable matriarchies with no conception of the Fatherhood of God. It was at times like this that His Eminence felt the burden of all the contention that had sundered his ministry and which made him wonder if in his certainties he had not been altogether too inflexible.

  After the Contending Heads came the leathery creature with five legs that he knew as the Hinderer, tripping everybody up, raising instantaneous and invisible walls that all the others crashed into, so that the dreadful procession compressed itself into a concertina of flailing limbs and obscene imprecations.

  Skilled as he was in the redaction of his horrifying visions, His Eminence remembered as if by reflex the machinations in which he had involved himself in order to close down the village schools.

  It was not that he was opposed to true education, where one learned the catechism by heart, the multiplication tables, the lives of the saints and national heroes, the basics of literacy, and the story and meaning of the Passion of Christ. To these he was not opposed at all. What he opposed was the brainwashing of the poor by thin and virtually secular missionaries who were poisoned by the insidious ideas of Paulo Freire, who prattled about ‘liberating the illiterate masses from their culture of silence’, preaching ‘struggle’ and ‘participation in the historical process’. His Eminence could concede the good intentions of such idealists, but how could he tolerate the idea of the nation’s young growing up without an education that would arrange in advance an eternal place at God’s Right Hand in Heaven?

  These pitiful youngsters with such an ‘education’ would surely be condemned forever to the limbo of the heathen, or the purifying flames of purgatory, or perhaps the everlasting torture of hell, tormented by demons such as these very demons, except that the demons of hell were even worse. Why did he feel guilty, when his reason told him that he would be saving them from spending eternity on fire without being consumed, with tridents twisting in their entrails? Why worry about it when they would have been saved by him personally from being violated everlastingly by the twin organs of Lucifer, one up their backside and one up their vagina (if they were women, that is, which they mostly were, since women were the greatest tempters after Satan himself)? Did those defenders of the underprivileged understand that the Devil’s two penises were toweringly huge, rougher than corn husks, and ejaculated semen burningly cold in such quantities that the condemned split repeatedly apart before being miraculously mended in order to be dually raped all over again? And yet His Eminence felt dejected about all those schoolhouses that were now pig-sheds and brothels, as well as about the careers of all the priests he had blighted, and also about the time when he had won promotion by falsely declaring in the relevant ears that his main rival for the post was homosexual.

  And here was the demon he knew as the Concealer, who was a furtive character indeed. He was praising the Cardinal with a sarcasm and irony so adept that all the demons were squealing with swinish and delighted laughter. ‘He is honest,’ said the Concealer, raising one finger in the air, so that His Eminence was reminded of the time when he had sold the cloisters of a cathedral to a supermarket chain, and had kept half the money for himself. ‘He is chaste,’ proclaimed the Concealer, and he burned with the shame of having impregnated Concepcion, his kitchen maid. He was reminded that once he had gone to a brothel in disguise, but the whore had recognised him and he had been obliged to have her killed, and then the killer had tried to blackmail him, and so he too now lay in unhallowed ground where his soul cried continually for light and for revenge in the crepuscular world of the Cardinal’s nightmares.

  ‘He honours his mother and father,’ said the Concealer, grinning whilst the demons sniggered and pointed, and the cleric recalled how he had left his own mother to die a lunatic in the filth of an asylum rather than house her in the palace and thereby let it be known from her appearance that he had Indian blood in his veins.

  ‘He loves his neighbour, he is full of compassion,’ smirked the Concealer, so that the vision of a ghastly mistake returned to him once more. It had been in the time of the disappearances, which he had not believed to be truly occurring, thinking the stories to be the propaganda of subversives. He had given away to the Army the hiding place in the sanctuary of a Marxist priest, and had had to look on in horror as they had filled him up with bullets and carried him away in the St John’s Day altarcloth, which he had later received back, freshly laundered, but dark with perpetual and reproachful stains.

  And the whole c
ongregation of these skeletal monsters, the Smiters, the Flaming ones, the Litigators, the Dispersers, the Falsifiers, danced around him as he lay upon the flags, panting and groaning. He gazed up at those leering eyes with their sepulchral squints, their skin like that of corpses, stretched tightly over the sharp angles of their bones (reminding him, forgive him the blasphemy, of the dried body of a saint), their copious genitals flapping and waving with a rustling like vultures’ wings, and he turned over on his back, still cradling the terrible pain in his entrails.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated. ‘Domine Deus,’ he began, his voice cracking with grief. ‘Agnus Dei, Filius Patris, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis; Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostrum, Qui sedes ad dexteram patris, miserere nobis.’ With peace descending upon him he added, ‘Kyrie, Eleison. Christe, Eleison,’ and then he confessed to Almighty God, Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, Blessed Michael the Archangel, Blessed John the Baptist, to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints, that he had sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed. He struck his chest in penitence, as at mass, and the twittering demons faded from the room at the same time as the appalling pain in his guts diminished to the remains of a suggestive throb.

  Concepcion came into the lectorium and found him struggling to get to his feet. ‘The pain again?’ she enquired. ‘You must take yourself to a doctor, my cadenay.’

  ‘I accept it as a just punishment,’ he said, looking up at her through the tears of his terrible affliction.

  Concepcion was a mulatta, his kitchen maid, with one child of his to her credit, and in truth he loved her in her carnality more even than he loved the Virgin in her sexless spirituality. She put her arms around him to give him comfort, and, later in the night when she had slipped into his chamber, she solaced him with the musky familiarity of her nakedness.

  But when he got up at three o’clock in the morning to go to relieve his bladder he could not resume his sleep because the cohort of the devils was back again, parading around the room, swinging from the lightpull and the tapestries sown by widows that depicted the Stations of the Cross.