The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman Read Free Page A

had caved in on itself and was full of mud and rocks. I was helped in this by a Frenchman named Antoine, a man of considerable culture who had chosen to live here because he was attached to the people, with whom he had arrived in the original immigration. Like most Frenchmen, he was extremely fond of philosophising about women, and was married to someone called Françoise, who had apparently been cured of a foul cancer by indigenous methods.
    It took us two months to dig out the well and rebuild its walls, and at the bottom I found the skull of a baby, which I assume to have been left there as a sacrifice in times past. I keep this tiny skull on my bookshelf as my own Renaissance-style memento mori, and I frequently speculate as to the nature of the story of its tragedy. There was fortunately still water at the bottom of the well, and I remember that when I remarked to Antoine that it was strange that water should flow beneath the side of a mountain, he observed, ‘I can think of many stranger things.’
    We repaired the walls and roof of the house, and painted the rooms completely white so that they became suddenly clean, bright, and spacious. Antoine and I managed, at some danger to ourselves (I feel in retrospect), to install electricity by connecting up a cable to the faltering system invented by a teacher. This man was Profesor Luis, who had set up a row of windmills to generate power; this was perfectly adequate for lighting, but was somewhat feeble when high amperage was required, so that the electric cooker that I had flown in by helicopter turned out to be of more use as a storage cupboard.
    It often happens when setting up a house that one finds quite suddenly that there is an urgent need for some item overlooked during the last expedition. The track down from my house was a deeply pitted one that served as a watercourse each time that it rained, and although I have stabilised it since, it was to begin with only negotiable on foot or by mule, or by Antoine’s ancient three-wheeled tractor. This tractor had been half-buried in the mud of theflood at Chiriguana, but Sr. Vivo’s father, who is in fact General Hernando Montes Sosa, governor of Cesar, had it dug out and brought in slung under a vast helicopter gun ship, at his son’s request. It is commonly said in this country that General Sosa is the only member of the military hierarchy who ever does anything useful.
    There was at the far end of the town a tienda that sold goods brought in by mule-train from Ipasueño, and so every few days I would find myself rattling and bumping my way to it on Antoine’s formidable old tractor. This shop was owned by a middle-aged couple who left the running of it to their daughter, a girl of twenty or so years whose name was Ena, as I discovered by overhearing the father asking of her the price of a bottle of Ron Caña.
    Ena was small and strongly built; usually she wore a plain, faded blue dress, and her feet were always bare. Sometimes I used to think that her head was very slightly too large for her, but she had an appealing and serene face framed by her long black hair. She reminded me forcibly of a Greek girl with whom I had once been in love, for she had the same smooth and soft olive skin, and big brown eyes beneath eyebrows almost heavy enough to meet in the middle. On her forearms were the traces of soft black downy hair, which, to be frank, is something that has always driven me crazy, and her fingers were slim and elegant.
    The best thing about her, however, was her elfin spirit; she had an air of quiet amusement, a semi-concealed puckishness, an innocent devilry, that gave her the aura of having existed from all eternity, and of being able to see the funny side of virtually everything. I perceived that she had a streak of mischief in her, as was to be revealed when I discovered how it was that she had kept me for so long in ignorance.
    I had found in Sr. Vivo an inexhaustible library of Andean tunes, and he had