The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman Read Free

proper Castilian ‘o’ on the ends of words.
    I was travelling in this country looking for charango tunes that used the pentatonic mode, when I passed by a church in Ipasueño, where there was being held the funeral of a policeman. Out of curiosity I went and stood by the door, which is how I first heard the ‘Requiem Angelico’, which is now so famous that there is no need for me to describe it. It was being played by a small group of musicians playing mandolas, quenas, and the harmonium, and even in that form it moved the whole congregation to tears, myself not excepted.
    Assuming that the piece was traditional, I wrote it down immediately in my manuscript notebook with a feeling of the greatest excitement imaginable. As I travelled on through the sierras it fermented continuously in my mind, until one morning I awoke with an arrangement of it for string quartet almost wholly formed in my imagination. I wrote it down in a great hurry before it slipped away, and when I reached the capital I lost no time in posting it to my publisher in Mexico City.
    All the rest is history. The success it enjoyed there caused it to spread into the United States, whence it spread to France and the rest of Europe, where it became the theme of a Rumanian film thatwon at the Cannes Film Festival, probably only because of the music. The consequence of all this was that I became immensely wealthy because of the royalties, and you can easily imagine my alarm and distress when it transpired that the music was not traditional at all, but had been composed by the famous Dionisio Vivo of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. There was a spectacular panic in the legal department of my publisher, and eventually I travelled all the way to Cochadebajo de los Gatos with the company lawyer in order to sort out any problems before they arose.
    It was an horrifically arduous journey, taking four days through the sierras on muleback, and when we arrived at that extraordinary city populated entirely by eccentrics, it seemed at first that it had been a wasted journey. This was because Sr. Vivo himself had been quite unaware that his melody, and he himself also, were famous all over the world. He seemed to be very surprised, and had nothing more to say upon the subject than that we sould simply divide the proceeds half/half, since although he had composed the tune, I had made the arrangement. When he showed me his own arrangement I was astonished to find that it was in any case remarkably similar to my own, except of course that it was scored for different instruments. My lawyer jumped at the chance to come to so amicable an agreement, and Sr. Vivo even said that he did not mind if it was not retrospective, which meant that I could keep all the royalties that I had thencefar earned.
    Having spent some days in that wonderful city with its proliferation of tame black jaguars, its Inca buildings, and its population who practise the most enlightened and congenial religion I have ever come across, I fell ardently in love with the place and resolved to stay there despite its isolation from the rest of the world.
    I chose a small house on the edge of the city, and dug out the alluvial mud with the help of several cheerful characters who said that they came originally from Chiriguana, a settlement that was destroyed in a flood some years before.
    It was an ideal place for me, because I wanted fresh mountain air, space, privacy, a place where one could palpably feel the presence of ancient gods and the spirits of nature. But also it was a place where, when in the appropriate mood, one could find spectacular revelry and good humour.
    The house was merely an empty shell, but I chose it because it was on the sunny side of the valley, high enough to have a good view over the town, with a sufficient breeze to diminish the occasionally stupefying heat. It took me a good year to make the place inhabitable.
    The first thing that I did was to dig out the well at the side of the house, which