The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (12 page)

The Conde adopted his usual perplexed expression, and muttered, ‘But I am the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura. I myself.’

‘If indeed you are, then your portrait hangs in my father’s house, wearing this very ring. However it is not a very strong likeness of you, I must say.’

‘He was a dog of a painter,’ said the Conde, ‘and I paid him only half the crowns I owed him, the Devil rot his heart.’

However, I perceive that this digression is getting us no further towards the explanation of how we brought the tractors to the city, and perhaps I should conclude it by saying that Dionisio undertook the re-education of his ancestor, simultaneously using him as an invaluable source for obscure historical information, and for filling in gaps in the family tree. Perhaps I should add that the Conde has been recently agitating to meet Dionisio’s father, being under the impression that since the latter is a General he would be sufficiently warlike for them to have something in common.

But General Hernando Montes Sosa is in truth as far from barbarity as his ancestor is from civilisation, and it is because of him that the two tractors came to the city.

As I recall, it was shortly after the Battle of
Doña Barbara
, the consequence of an ill-conceived literacy project by Dionisio and Profesor Luis, that the former announced that he could get his father to arrange for a helicopter gunship to go and dig out the tractors from the mud of the Mula basin. There was very considerable opposition to this, because no one wanted anything to do with the Army. General Fuerte and Capitan Papagato wanted nothing to do with it because they were both deserters, and the rest because they had in the past suffered inconceivable persecution by it.

Dionisio, however, insisted that his father was a democrat and that the Armed Forces were now firmly under democratic control. He pointed out that General Fuerte and Capitan Papagato could very easily go to Santa Maria Virgen for the day, and that there was an
amnesty in place for guerrillas ever since the many Communist parties had been legalised. He further pointed out that nobody knew that anyone in the city had ever been a guerrilla in the first place, for the simple reason that nobody outside the area even knew that Cochadebajo de los Gatos existed. ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘I will meet the gunship in Ipasueño, and after we have taken off the pilot will be blindfolded, and I will guide him here verbally. In this manner he will never know where he has been. I will persuade him that it is a special army exercise, and I will arrange for my father to award him a medal or some kind of proficiency certificate.

Now Dionisio’s father was a man convinced that since the Army was the servant of the people it should occupy itself in peacetime by serving them. Naturally he knew nothing about the blindfolding plan, and so he agreed to what his son told him on the telephone, and agreed also that he should meet the gunship in Ipasueño Plaza, and that the pilot should be under his instructions. And that is exactly what happened.

The enormous machine landed in Ipasueño Plaza and caused an inferno of chaos as everybody scattered and their sombreros were swept away by the breeze of the blades. Dionisio and his two jaguars climbed in, giving rise to the myth (still current) that they had ascended to heaven in the fiery vehicle described by Ezekiel, and he managed somehow to persuade the pilot that part of the plan was to gain experience of flying blindfold. He came up with some wild hypothesis about how a helicopter pilot blinded in a gas attack might sometime have to fly his crew out under their spoken guidance. I should add that there were four members of the Regiment of Airborne Engineers on board also, but they were in the back of the aircraft and could not have memorised the route even if they had wanted to.

I do not know how Dionisio Vivo knew the way by air (people say that he is more than he seems), but the machine arrived in our own plaza, causing a confusion here equal to that at Ipasueño. The cloud of dust that was raised up in the noonday heat was of a peculiarly choking variety, and at least one innocent chicken met its maker in the vortex of the blades, scattering blood and feathers disproportionate to its size.

Embarking on this voyage were Antoine and Don Emmanuel, since the tractors were theirs, myself (at Antoine’s invitation), Aurelio,
who was taking over from Dionisio as navigator, Sergio, and Misael. Together with the four airborne engineers and the pilot, this meant that there were eleven of us armed with spades and shovels for the purpose of digging out the tractors, but there would have been space for many more of us in that vast machine of war, which was probably sold to our own government by the Yanquis in exchange for dollar bananas and emeralds.

Aurelio did not blindfold the pilot, as he asserted that at the end of the journey the pilot would not be able to remember where he had been; he smoked a vile-smelling concoction the whole way, saying that this was the purpose of it. He was, as usual, in the traditional dress of his people, complete with the long plait behind that in fact one hardly ever sees on an Aymara these days.

Don Emmanuel as usual behaved most embarrassingly, and I have the vivid recollection of him urinating out of the sliding door ‘because I have always enjoyed making piss-holes in the snow’. He seemed oblivious of the fact that he was teetering above three hundred metres of empty space at the bottom of which was not a soft landing. He was shirtless, having failed to anticipate the extreme cold of altitude, and in his navel he wore a small, greying wad of cotton wool. He claimed that it was impregnated with alcohol, and that he wore it because one evening Felicidad had seen fit to explore the bottomless recesses of the aforesaid navel with her forefinger, and had pronounced it to be both smelly and full of fluff. He asseverated that he liked to conduct a campaign against ‘dingleberries’ of this nature, and seemed most disheartened to find that whilst he was urinating the wad had been whipped away by the slipstream, whereupon Misael remarked that he would have been spared this indignity had not his belly been so protuberant.

The journey took a mere hour, which astonished Sergio, who said that it had taken many days to travel it on foot with the cattle and the mule-trains. It was a spectacular itinerary. We flew between the peaks and at as low an altitude along the valleys as could be managed, because it was warmer and because the pilot said that it saved fuel. We saw numerous tiny Indian settlements dotted amid the pajonales, flocks of vicuñas and llamas ran wildly beneath us, and we saw the worked-out mines that had once filled the coffers of the Houses of Castile and Aragon. The vibration of the aircraft set off a spectacular
snowslide in one place; from our position the cascade of snow looked all innocence, majesty and beauty, although God help anyone who might have been beneath it. A more paralysing death could not be imagined.

It became clear that Aurelio was leading us over progressively lower altitudes, because the air even in the cabin began to feel palpably thicker and more clinging, and beneath us the vegetation had grown lusher and more arboreal. We flew over a stretch of forest, and saw a thin plume of smoke, which Aurelio said was his wife Carmen smoking the rubber. It was said of Aurelio that he could be with his wife in the jungle at the same time as he was with us in Cochadebajo de los Gatos, and that no one could tell which one was the real Aurelio, not even Carmen.

Having crossed this forest we sped on over the Mula basin. Sergio and Misael were utterly astonished by what they saw, because the lie of the land had changed completely since the time that they had inhabited it before the flood; nothing was recognisable except for the roofs of buildings and even they were greatly obscured by primary growth. The jungle was reclaiming the land, and this seemed to give Aurelio great satisfaction. Apropos of this he told us that of all plants, God enjoyed making the cactus the most, and of all animals he enjoyed making the dormidera. This last is a giant black anaconda which sleeps so profoundly that its snores keep all other jungle animals awake, not only because of the reverberations, but also because its pungent halitosis militates against sleep.

Misael and Sergio recognised the roof of Doña Constanza’s hacienda, and fell into a fit of laughter from which it was almost impossible to rescue them. Don Emmanuel explained to me that it was because the Mula had changed course so much that it now ran clean through Doña Constanza’s swimming pool. I failed to see the humour in this.

We flew on to the site of where Don Emmanuel’s hacienda used to be, and the helicopter had to hover there whilst the four airborne engineers descended on a winch in order to clear a space in the vegetation for it to land. This having been done, the craft was landed and we were obliged to hack our way to the site of the tractor shed, where we found that both tractor and shed were buried one and a
half metres deep in alluvial deposits, and were completely entangled and encased in lianas.

It was midday, and down there on the plain the heat was dizzying in intensity. Add to this the infernal pestiferations of the insects, and you will appreciate that to me it was a purgatorial experience which I hope never to repeat. The only bright side of it was that we saw many animals that were unafraid on account of their ignorance of humans. We saw a maned wolf, looking exactly like a fox on stilts, and we saw a potu pretending to be a branch. We saw an ant-eater carrying its baby on its back, and a capybara, which Aurelio called ‘the master of the grasses’. Apart from that we saw a boa, a whipper snake, and a teju lizard carrying a bird’s egg in its mouth. The capybara made a fine meal when we all got home.

We sweated and grunted over removing the roof of the shed, and further sweated and grunted over cutting away the growth and digging out the machine. The perspiration seeping into my broken blisters was an excruciation. Altogether it took three hours to perform this task, and it seemed more like an aeon, but in the end it was worth it just to see what the pilot did to Don Emmanuel.

Don Emmanuel was, I think, somewhat depressed to see what had happened to his hacienda, and he lost his customary good humour. To begin with he was directing his picturesque curses against the tractor, the insects, and the lianas, but he finished up by cursing all of us as well. His red beard was glistening with the sweat that ran down from his brow, and his capacious belly had acquired a deep red hue.

Now the pilot was a very big black man with a distinguished bearing, and he was intelligent too; they do not allow morons to fly helicopter gunships. He was saying to Don Emmanuel, ‘I think we should dig a tunnel under the tractor so that we can get the cables underneath.’

Don Emmanuel looked at him balefully and asked, ‘Do you have a dog?’

‘Si, señor,’ replied the pilot.

‘Well,’ said Don Emanuel, ‘your dog’s your mother.’

There was a stunned silence, and then all of us except for Aurelio, who has a great respect for dogs, burst out laughing. The big pilot carried on digging for a few moments, and then he straightened up
and said, ‘The next person to laugh finds their own way home,’ and we all fell silent on the instant. But Don Emmanuel would not desist. ‘Your mother is so much of a man that she is really your father,’ he said, and then he added, ‘And you wear a moustache in order to be reminded of her.’

The pilot said nothing, but when we had the tractor hooked up to the helicopter by cables and were embarking, the pilot blocked Don Emmanuel’s way and held out a helmet rather like that of a motor-cylist, and a thick quilted suit. ‘We wear these for the extreme cold of high altitude,’ he said.

Don Emmanuel looked puzzled.

‘You are not coming on my aircraft,’ said the pilot. ‘Put these on and ride the tractor.’

Now, we could see that Don Emmanuel was about to protest, but the big pilot went up close and glared down at him, holding out the suit. He added, ‘Or walk.’

Meek as an alpaca, Don Emmanuel put on the flying gear and clambered onto the seat of the tractor. He sat there clinging to the cables all the way home, whilst the pilot flew as close to the ground as it is possible to imagine. I am prepared to bet that Don Emmanuel was not only petrified but was positively congelated with cold once we got into the sierra. We were looking out of the doors, watching him frantically warding off the buzzards and alcamarini birds that hurtled towards him, and all of us swore afterwards that it was the best thing we had ever seen.

When we returned it was too late to go back to fetch Antoine’s tractor, and so we decided to fetch it on the day following. But when we assembled at dawn, who should come along but Remedios, Consuelo and Dolores, all armed to the teeth, and Misael said, ‘Madre de Dios, they have come to take revenge upon the Army.’

But it was not so, for Remedios said, ‘You men get out of here, it is the women’s turn to ride the helicopter today,’ and Sergio started to protest, saying things like, ‘Ay, ay, this is man’s work, you pretty things go back to your pots,’ and that was the worst remark he could say. Dolores swung at the side of his head with her mochila, and it cracked against his ear like a pistol shot. Dolores keeps her mochila filled with Brazil nuts in order to threaten any man who refuses her
advances, but for once a ride in the helicopter was of more importance to her than one hundred pesos for a good lay.

So we men backed off, and the women brought Antoine’s tractor back in good time even though Consuelo spread the story later that Dolores had enjoyed all four of the soldiers plus the pilot during breaks in their labours, and the latter spread stories about Consuelo being envious. They had a fight afterwards during the fiesta that was held to give thanks to the serviceman, interrupting the speech that Remedios was making in which she was declaring peace unilaterally on the Army and announcing the formal disbanding of the People’s Vanguard. After the fight was over Remedios said that in future the Army could help as often as they liked, as long as they were from the units commanded by General Hernando Montes Sosa. Indeed, later on they arrived with a helicopter bearing ten drums of fuel for the tractors, and three mechanical engineers to dismantle them and put them into service.