Читать книгу Mask of the Andes - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 6

‘You better get yourself some longer skirts.’

‘Oh God, Terry, don’t start talking like a priest!’

‘I’m not talking as a priest. But this isn’t Paris or Rome or wherever you’ve been these past five years. Women here are expected to be modest, at least in public—’

Carmel put a hand on McKenna’s arm. ‘I’m sorry, darling. All right, you win. I’ll buy some nice modest skirts today. I don’t want to spoil your image in front of the Bishop and your flock.’

McKenna grinned wryly. ‘It’s not my image I’m worried about – I don’t even know that I’ve got one.’

They were sitting out in a small patio behind the Ruiz house. A walnut tree leaned against its own sharp-edged shadow in one corner and ancient vines, just beginning to leaf, climbed like snakes to the rusted spikes that topped the high stone wall. The McKennas sat on a wooden bench in the brilliant sunlight in the centre of the patio. Carmel, though she wore dark glasses, kept glancing towards the shadow beneath the walnut tree.

‘We’ll sit over there if you like,’ said McKenna. ‘But you’ll freeze. At this altitude there’s a difference of twenty, twenty-five degrees between sunlight and shade.’

‘Pancho warned me to take it easy for a few days. I already have a headache. Is that usual?’

‘Pretty usual. You probably won’t sleep well, either, for the first few nights. You should’ve lain down for a couple of hours as soon as you got here – that helps your body adjust. But if you go tearing around – do you still tear around like you used to?’

She nodded. ‘I guess so.’

‘Why run so fast, Carmel?’ McKenna searched in his pockets, found his own dark glasses, put them on: as much a protection against her as against the glare. He and Carmel had never been particularly close even as children; the six years’ difference in their ages had been too big a handicap. He had gone away to prep school at twelve, then on to college; she had gone to a day school in Westwood, then persuaded her mother to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland. They had written each other spasmodically, but they had been the noncommittal letters of acquaintances rather than of blood relatives. They were strangers with the same name; but he knew that committal had at last presented itself. She had not come all this way on a whim, he was sure of that. Nor because she had a yen for Francisco Ruiz, he was equally sure of that. Something was troubling her and for some reason she had reached out to him. And he, the missionary, the helper, suddenly was wary.

‘Would you rather I hadn’t come?’ It was as if she had read his thoughts: she had her own wariness.

He was glad of the dark glasses, the one great advance in deception since man had first learned to lie; he knew his eyes were often too candid for his own good. ‘No. No, I’m glad to see you. But it’s a long way – I—’

‘You don’t understand why I bothered?’ She sat back, put an arm along the back of the bench, slowly drummed her fingers. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? We should be able to talk to each other more easily than this. I’m twenty-four and you’re – what? – thirty? – and I don’t suppose we’ve ever had more than an hour’s serious conversation together in all that time.’

‘Whose fault do you think it was?’ He didn’t mean it as an aggressive question, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘I don’t know. I sometimes wonder if it was Mother’s.’ She raised her head and even behind her dark glasses he was aware of her careful gaze.

‘How was she when you called her?’ He avoided the silent question she had put to him.

‘Hysterical, when I said I was coming down to see you. Hysterically glad, I mean. Jealous, too, I think,’ she added, and looked away from him, not even trusting to the dark glasses.

He stared down at the ground at their shadows, razor-edged and dead as paper silhouettes. Shadows at this altitude were always much more clear-cut than at less rarefied heights; the mental processes were also said to be sharper: but only keener in being aware of problems, not in solving them. He had solved nothing in the nine months he had been here and he knew he could not solve this new problem of himself and Carmel. But he was now acutely conscious of it as he had never been before. He realized for the first time that she was jealous of him.

‘There’s nothing to stop her coming down here,’ he said, dodging the real issue for the moment.

‘Do you want her to?’

‘No-o.’ It was the first time he had ever admitted it, even to himself.

Was he mistaken or did something like delight flick across her face? ‘She said you’d never asked her down here. When I told her I was coming down to surprise you, she said it was only correct for a lady to wait till she was asked. God, she’s like something out of Henry James!’

He nodded, smiling, and impulsively she put her hand on his. He had not liked her when they had been in the house with the Ruiz family, had been annoyed by her brashness and a quality of hardness that had looked as if it could never be cracked. But now she was softer, even vulnerable, and suddenly he felt a warmth of feeling that he recognized as love, something he had not felt for any of the family in years. He squeezed her fingers.

‘We should feel sorry for her—’

‘I do, Terry. Really. I couldn’t hate her, though God knows—’ She took off her dark glasses as if she wanted him to see the truth of what she was about to say. ‘She made me hate you. I was so damned jealous of you—’

‘I never knew,’ he said. ‘Not till just now.’

She squeezed his hand again, as if making up for lost time in a display of affection. ‘I think you have some of Dad’s sensitivity in you. He was a selfish, randy old fool, running after those girls the way he did – in a way, I suppose, he was a real sonofabitch, leaving us like that – but he had his moments, sometimes he knew exactly what I was trying to say even though I couldn’t open my mouth—’ She put her glasses back on, stared at the darkness of the past. ‘It was a pity he wasn’t always like that. He might have saved Mother from herself. And saved us from her.’

A tall hedge lined one side of the patio, separating it from a large garden. Through the hedge he could see an Indian gardener lazily turning over the yellow soil among some shrubs; some buds on rose bushes promised the coming of summer. The gardener wore a tribal headband that strapped something to his ear; it was a moment or two before McKenna recognized that the small package was a transistor radio. The gardener moved zombie-like through the motions of his work, his face stiff and blank; whatever he was listening to on the radio, talk or music or a description of a football game, seemed to have no effect on him; the radio could have been no more than an uncomfortable earmuff. To McKenna it seemed to typify the Indians: they were of the world but they were deaf to it. Just as the McKennas had been deaf to each other for years.

‘Why did you come?’ he asked, sure enough of her now to put the question.

She, too, was looking through the hedge at the gardener; but he was just part of the scenery to her, someone to be captured on film by a tourist’s camera. ‘I wanted to see what you had done with your life.’

‘Not much,’ he confessed; then added defensively, ‘At least not yet.’

‘At least you’re doing something. I’ve done nothing, absolutely goddam nothing. I’m what you preach against – a parasite.’

‘If I preached against parasites around here, I’d be branded a Communist.’ He had automatically lowered his voice, glanced over his shoulder towards the house. When he looked back at her she was smiling. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘You. The one thing I remember about you was that you were never scared. Cautious, yes, but never frightened of anything. That time you were home from school on vacation and the burglars broke into the house. You locked Mother and me in her bedroom and went downstairs on your own. The guys, whoever they were, heard you coming and ran. But you went down there, that was the thing – you were my hero for a day or two.’

‘I was scared stiff,’ he said, not asking why he had remained her hero only for a day or two.

She nodded towards the house. ‘What were you then – cautious or scared?’

‘Cautious, I guess. It’s the only way to get by up here. Nobody here, neither the criollos nor the campesinos, accept you on your own terms. It’s their terms all the time or nothing.’

‘Is that why you haven’t made much of your life here so far?’ He nodded and she put her hand sympathetically on his again. Then she said, ‘That was my mistake, I think. I tried living on my own terms. I’ve only just discovered I was never really sure what they were.’

‘Then we’re alike,’ he said, and she looked pleased. ‘I’m never quite sure about people who say they’ll only live on their own terms, whether they’re conceited or selfish or just insecure. I’ve never been convinced it’s an entirely noble attitude.’

‘ “To thine own self be true” –you think Polonius was wrong?’

‘In the Church, anyway, I’ve never found him proved right.’ He stood up, smiling now to divert her from what he had just let slip; it was too soon, he did not know her well enough yet, to confess his doubts. ‘I better go see what the Bishop wants.’

She stood up beside him. ‘You’re not annoyed because I came, Terry?’

‘No. I’m glad,’ he said, and meant it. He had reached a depth of loneliness where reunion even with someone half a stranger had its comfort. ‘Will you be staying long?’

‘A week or two. Until we get to know each other again.’

‘Will you stay here?’ He nodded at the house.

‘Depends. Not if Pancho becomes too possessive.’

‘Is it serious with him?’

‘On my part, you mean?’ She shook her head. ‘He’s the latest in a long line. I haven’t been a very good girl – the nuns at Marymount must be wearing out their rosaries praying for me. I’m not exactly the right sort of sister for a priest. I think I have too much of Dad in me.’ She smiled wryly, nothing at all like the brash girl he had met an hour earlier. ‘Father, forgive me, for I have sinned—’

‘Who hasn’t?’ he said, unembarrassed.

He left the Ruiz house and drove back to the main plaza. The benches in the square were now occupied by old men dressed in old-fashioned dark suits, their wary faces hidden in the shade of broad-brimmed felt hats; they looked like retired gangsters from movies of the thirties, men who had stepped out of frame but not out of costume. But McKenna knew that they were not as interesting as old-time gangsters. They were just middle-class criollos living on dreams that were as dim as their eyesight, selling off their possessions piece by piece, hoping that at the end they would have enough left to pay for a funeral befitting their blood. A flock of young children, criollos and mestizos, wafted up the broad steps of the cathedral, two nuns fluttering behind them like Black Orpington hens. An army truck went round the plaza and pulled up outside the prison on the other side of the square. Half a dozen prisoners, all Indians, chained together, got down from the back of the truck and were pushed through the small door in the tall wooden gates. The truck drove off and that side of the square was once more quiet and deserted. No one in the square had done more than glance casually across at the prisoners. Too much interest, McKenna knew, might have brought an inquiry from the security police on the third floor of the government palace on the northern side of the plaza. He looked across and saw the man at the third floor window: the sun flashed on his binoculars as he turned them from the prison gates on to McKenna himself as the latter got out of the Jeep outside the Bishop’s palace. For one mad moment the priest wanted to turn and jerk his thumb at the watcher, but reason prevailed. You did not make rude gestures in front of the Bishop’s palace, certainly not at the security police.

As McKenna crossed the tessellated pavement a small boy flung himself at his feet; but he was not a juvenile sinner seeking absolution, just a bootblack claiming the Americano padre could not visit the Bishop with dirty shoes. McKenna submitted to the blackmail, gave the boy a lavish tip, then went into the palace spotless at least up to the ankles. Behind him the bootblack, clutching half a day’s income in his hand, told him he was a saint.

If it were only so easy, McKenna told himself.

Bishop Ruiz was in his study reading The Wall Street Journal; he nodded at it as he put it down. ‘There are so many Bibles to get through these days. Do you read it, Padre McKenna?’

‘No, your grace. I am stupid when it comes to understanding high finance.’

‘Your father never taught you anything about it? He was a rich man.’

‘My father used to say that a fool and his father’s money are soon parted, so he never gave me any. Not till he died.’

‘I knew him when he owned the San Cristobal mine. I was a young priest then – I baptized you, did you know that?’

‘No,’ said McKenna, and wondered if he was expected to feel honoured. He also wondered how much the Bishop, a wealthy man even as a priest, had charged for the service.

‘I used to go out and say Mass for the miners. Your father would count the heads at Mass and then give me an American dollar for each one – he always seemed to have a bank of dollars. He would joke that he was buying his way into Heaven on the bended knees of the Indians.’

‘What did the Indians think of him?’ McKenna had never known the Bishop to talk of his father before and he wondered if this was the reason he had been brought here. The Bishop had chosen to speak in Spanish and that meant this was more than just a social call. McKenna was puzzled, seeking a connection between himself and his father that would concern the Bishop, but he could think of none. Even the older Indians up on the altiplano, ones such as Jesu Mamani, had never asked McKenna about his father.

Bishop Ruiz hesitated, then said, ‘I do not know, to be truthful. I have never known the miners to love any of the mine owners.’

They didn’t love my father, McKenna thought. You know the truth about him but you can’t condemn him because that would mean condemning your own kind.

‘When your father sold out to that other company, they worked the mine out in five years, drove the miners like dogs, then closed it down and went home. They left a caretaker-manager and his wife there, Americans. When the revolution came in 1952, the miners went back there and killed them – horribly. I saw the bodies—’ He shook his head, worked his mouth at an old vile taste, shuddered because he knew the future might one day taste the same. ‘The miners all went to communion the next morning and the priest up in Altea, poor Padre Luis, was too frightened to turn them away from the altar rail. He was afraid they would have killed him, too, if he had refused them.’ He looked across his wide, leather-topped desk at McKenna. ‘Those are the sort of people you are dealing with, my son.’

Now he’s getting to the reason for my being here, McKenna thought. But he was still puzzled: ‘I don’t think they connect me with the mine. What that other company did, I mean. As for what my father did—’ He tailed off, not wanting to condemn his father to this man who would give absolution too easily, because his own money came from the same sort of exploitation.

‘I did not say they did,’ said Bishop Ruiz patiently. In the cathedral next door the bells tolled for the midday Angelus. One of the bells was cracked and it sounded what could have been a blasphemous note; but the bells had been rung for four hundred years and tradition won out over music. The Bishop listened to it, flinching a little, then put it out of his mind; he would leave the question of a new bell to his successor, just as his predecessor had left it to him. He looked across at the young priest who was a more immediate problem. ‘Padre McKenna, did you read the Pope’s encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae?’

‘Of course,’ said McKenna, and knew now why he had been sent for.

‘It has come to our ears—’ Bishop Ruiz sat up straight. That’s it, thought McKenna, never lounge when using the royal or episcopal plural; the day, only half over, had been full of shock and now he was beginning to feel hysterically facetious. ‘It has come to our ears that you have been giving the Pill to some of the women up in Altea.’

‘Where did you hear that, your grace?’

‘We have our sources,’ said the Bishop; and McKenna had a vision of the fat little priest Padre Luis sitting exactly where he himself was sitting now. Padre Luis didn’t have the courage to condemn murder but he could condemn a priest who went against the Holy Father’s orders. ‘We are assured they are reliable. Are the reports true?’

McKenna sighed inwardly, then nodded. ‘Yes, your grace.’

‘Does the Superior of your order condone this?’

‘He doesn’t know. I bought the supply of the Pill out of my own funds, had them mailed down to me from the States.’

‘Addressed to you as a priest?’ The Bishop’s voice, which had become formal once he had got down to business, suddenly broke. The bells next door abruptly subsided, the cracked bell clanging out the last note sardonically.

‘No. They were addressed to Senor T. J. McKenna, care of general delivery at the post office here in San Sebastian. I did my best to be discreet, your grace.’

Bishop Ruiz had a sense of humour; he permitted himself a smile at the young rebel. ‘That seems to be where your discretion stopped, at the post office. Padre, do you realize the magnitude of what you have done? It is one thing to sit in the confessional and condone what married couples tell you they have done. But you have—’ He threw up his elegant hands. ‘You are doing far worse than question the Holy Father’s dictum, you are actually sinning against it actively. As much – as much as if you were bedding with these women yourself!’

McKenna had expected a more sophisticated reprimand than that. ‘The thought couldn’t have been farther from my mind. I mean about going to bed with these women.’

‘Don’t joke,’ said the Bishop sharply, realizing he was not dealing with a stupid village priest like Padre Luis. I keep forgetting, he thought, this young man comes from the same class as myself. Well, almost: the blood may be coarser, but he has as much education and money.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound facetious—’

‘Did the women come to you and ask your help in this way?’

‘Well, not exactly—’ McKenna hesitated, knowing even now that nothing he might say was going to win justification for what he had done.

‘What does that mean?’

‘One woman talked to me in the confessional. She has had twelve children in sixteen years – only four of them have survived.’

‘That was God’s will,’ said the Bishop, tasting the brass of an old platitude.

‘Forgive me for saying so, your grace, but I was the woman’s confessor. As far as I could tell, she had done nothing to warrant God’s punishment like that.’

‘Are you questioning God’s will?’

McKenna took a deep breath. ‘I guess I’m questioning the Church’s interpretation of God’s will. I can’t bring myself to believe that He meant these people to live like they have to, that poverty and the annual grief at the loss of a child are necessary for a state of grace. Forgive me again, but the Church in this country has done little, if anything, to alleviate the poverty of the Indians. I don’t know what the full answer to the problem is, but after listening to that woman I knew I had to do something. And cutting down the number of mouths to feed seemed to me at least a start towards defeating poverty. I didn’t hand out the Pill indiscriminately – I warned the women about possible side effects, but they were willing to take the risk. Women, even simple peasant women, get tired of being continually pregnant. Men, especially priests, too often forget that. The Church isn’t just Rome, your grace – I’m part of it, too. I didn’t do this hurriedly or without a great deal of soul-searching—’

‘Do you think the Holy Father did not search his soul before he made his decision? You should not question his wisdom. A son does not tell his father what to do.’

McKenna heard the echo of Agostino’s remark earlier this morning. Oh God, he thought admiringly, how You weave Your web up there in Heaven. It had been Agostino’s mother, Maria Mamani, who had told him in the confessional that she wanted no more children.

‘Do you still have a supply of the contraceptive?’

‘Yes.’ He had ordered enough to supply every woman in Altea for a year; so far only Maria and three other women had come to him. He could imagine the snickering that had gone on in the mail order warehouse in Chicago when his order had arrived; some randy guy down there in Bolivia, Senor T. J. McKenna, was having a ball with a tribe of Indians or something. Storing the pills had become a problem in itself; one box of them had already been eaten by rats. At least he might have achieved something there, cut down on the rodent birth rate. ‘Quite a lot of it.’

‘You will dispose of it – immediately. I shall write your Superior and inform him of what you have done. I shall leave him to punish you or order your penance. In the meantime I shall put you on probation for six months. If you are intransigent again, Pacue McKenna, I shall order your removal from my diocese.’

He called me intransigent, not sinful, McKenna noted. Did that mean the Bishop had his own doubts? ‘Yes, your grace.’

‘My son,’ Bishop Ruiz’s tone softened again, shed formality as he might shed a chasuble, ‘you cannot change things overnight. Not on this continent. You and Senor Taber come down here, full of good intentions, no one doubts your sincerity, but – but you look at us from the outside. We are another world. We shall come into your world in time, it is inevitable, but you must give us time. We understand the campesinos better than you. Do you not think that I, as a man of God, want their lives improved? But you have to be patient, my son. Che Guevara came here with good intentions, though misguided ones, but even he did not understand the campesinos. And he was a South American, an Argentinian, not a North American like you. Reform will come, but you must allow us to make our own pace.’

McKenna wanted to ask who had put the brakes on since the reforms of 1952, but he knew the interview was over. ‘Yes, your grace.’

Bishop Ruiz rose, came round his desk and held out his hand. McKenna hesitated. The ring glinted on the finger, an invitation to bow to authority: should I ignore it? Then discretion overcame bravado: I’m on probation right now. He bent and kissed the ring.

‘God be with you, my son.’ Then the Bishop looked him up and down. ‘You look very smart today. You wouldn’t be out of place in some rich parish in the United States.’

‘I think I would be,’ said McKenna, and after a moment the Bishop smiled and nodded in agreement.

McKenna went out of the room and Bishop Ruiz returned to his chair. He picked up The Wall Street Journal, but he was reading a foreign language, one that suddenly, if only temporarily, he did not feel comfortable with. He dropped the newspaper back on the desk and sat staring across the room. He reached across, took a cigar from a tooled leather box, lit it and sat back again. His purple biretta rested on one corner of the desk and he picked it up and examined it as a mining engineer might examine a piece of quartz. Is that what I have spent my life working for?

Or had he worked for it? The second son of the Ruiz had always been meant for the Church. It had been that way for generations; one or two second sons had rebelled, but the family had fixed that: they had been banished and the third sons had taken their places. The succession had been as ordained as that in a royal family: the eldest son to run the estates, the second son to enter the Church, the other sons to stand by in case of replacement: just like a royal family or a football team, the Bishop mused. It had not been a difficult life in the priesthood; no Ruiz could be expected to take vows of poverty so none was ever expected to join an ascetic order unless he wished to. Sometimes the Bishop, a naturally sensual man, had regretted the absence of women in his life; but then he consoled himself that, had he been permitted a wife, he might have made a bad choice. All the prayers in the world could not guarantee a good wife; woman was God’s best joke on man. He saw that every time he went to his brother’s house. Alejandro, who thought of himself as a king, was mocked by his queen; Romola was her husband’s purgatory here on earth and she enjoyed every minute of her punishment of him. The Lord had at least protected the Bishop from someone like her.

He swung his chair round, looked out the window. The young American priest was just getting into his Jeep; a young bootblack rushed at him, but McKenna brusquely waved him away. The young man was angry. And I am responsible, thought the Bishop. But what else could I do? The world, our world, does need changing; who knows that better than I? Some day the campesinos will rise up and cut all our throats, even mine or anyway that of one of my successors; the purple biretta won’t be a protection, only a target. We shall be killed because we are Ruiz; if not Alejandro and I, then Francisco and his brother Jorge now in the seminary up at La Paz. Time is running out for us.

Cigar ash fell on his soutane and he fastidiously brushed it off. He swung his chair round and looked back into the room. It was a room that suggested luxury, one that would not have been out of place in the Ruiz family mansion; he never made the mistake of receiving any of the campesinos or any of the Leftist government officials here. But it typified him, he knew: he was a lover of the good life, of privilege and the past: he was a Ruiz. And that is why, even though I think he may have the right approach, I cannot condone what McKenna has done. It is too late: I am too soft, corrupt, if you like, to join the protestors; old men do not make good revolutionaries. I am not old in years, it is true; but like Alejandro I am old in my ways, trapped by history. All I can do is pray that God forgives the reactionaries of the world.

There was a knock on his door and his secretary, a small, thin mestizo priest, older than himself, came in. ‘Senor Obermaier is here to see you, your grace.’

The ex-Nazi: now there was a real reactionary, one through conviction, not through laziness. The Bishop sat up, feeling a little less condemned. He put out his cigar, straightened his soutane. Though he did not like Karl Obermaier, he was easy to talk to: he was another man who lived in the past.

‘Show Senor Obermaier in. And bring us some wine. The Niersteiner would be appropriate, I think.’