Mask of the Andes

2

Harry Taber had never been in a confessional in his life. He had never been in a church except to attend the weddings and funerals of friends and relatives, and then only reluctantly. His father and mother had been passionate humanists as well as passionate socialists; Bill Taber, in his drunken moments, had been known to insist that God was a Tory invention. When Harry Taber had first fallen in love, almost overnight, he had been dismayed to find that his girl was a Catholic who believed in all the claptrap of religion and particularly in the necessity of being married by a priest. They had argued about the matter for a whole year, then Beth, the girl, had discovered she was pregnant; suddenly depressed, she had capitulated and they had been married in a registry office. Two months later she had lost the baby and twelve months later they had separated. Taber had blamed the break-up on religion but as time had gone on he had come to the conviction that there had been nothing and no one to blame but himself. But the judgment of himself had made him no more tolerant of religion, only more careful when he had chosen his second wife.

However, he confided none of this to McKenna immediately. Once he had left university his life had been so peripatetic that friendships had come to have the impermanent qualities of those photographs one took in those do-it-yourself kiosks on seaside promenades: instant development and already fading before you were out of sight of the kiosk. Over the last five years he had come to appreciate the poor value of such friendships and he had become increasingly stingy in paying out himself to chance acquaintances. But he still valued companionship, even if he now looked for it with a cautious eye. The man with no friends is the one who appreciates most that no man is an island; he is the one who never asks for whom the bell tolls, for he knows. Taber was doing his best to turn a deaf ear to bells of any sort.

When McKenna said he had to get ready to go down to San Sebastian, Taber said, ‘May I ride back with you?’

McKenna looked surprised. ‘How did you get up here?’

‘I have a Land-Rover, brought it down from La Paz with me. My driver went back down to Altea to buy some fish. I was going to walk down there and pick him up. But—’

‘I’ll be glad of your company,’ said McKenna eagerly, and disappeared into the bedroom. ‘And I’ll give you some fish. I’ve got far too much.’

Taber walked out into the yard. The wind was still blowing, bringing with it the chill of the distant snow. The mission had a beautiful view of the lake and the jagged wall of mountains rising beyond it, but it was completely exposed to the wind up here at the top of the slope. In one corner of the stone-walled compound some chickens huddled mournfully together in a small tin-roofed coop; in another corner a thin sad cow looked as if she might yield only iced yoghurt. A small vegetable garden had been attempted on the sheltered side of the kitchen hut, but it looked more like a gesture than a productive enterprise. The huts themselves, of adobe walls and corrugatediron roofs, suggested an isolated slum, a tiny section that had somehow drifted apart from the rest of the world’s poverty. What a miserable bloody existence he must lead, Taber thought; and wondered why Christ had always made a virtue of poverty. Still maybe this went over better with the Indians than would the affluence of the Vatican he had seen when last in Rome. The world even now wasn’t ready for missionaries in Mercedes-Benz.

McKenna came out in a well-cut black suit and wearing a clerical collar; he was hardly recognizable as the man who ten minutes before had been in a torn turtleneck sweater and faded jeans. ‘I may run into the Bishop – he has some idea that God is fashion-conscious. Here’s your fish.’

Taber took the three salmon strung on a piece of wire. ‘Are you having tea or sacramental wine or whatever it is you have at the cathedral?’

‘I’m on my way to see some people named Ruiz. You know them?’

‘I know of them. I’m supposed to call on Alejandro Ruiz. I gather he’s the big-wig around here.’

‘That describes him. He’s the one I’m going to see. I got a message last night he wanted to see me. Not even us foreigners ignore an invitation from a Ruiz.’ He shot a careful glance at Taber. ‘You might remember that.’

He led the way round to the back of the larger hut. There, under a lean-to, stood a late-model Jeep fitted out elaborately for camping; as Taber climbed into the front seat he glanced back and saw the bunk, the folding table and the built-in cupboards. The contrast to what surrounded it was too much for Taber and he could not hide his surprise.

‘A present from my mother,’ said McKenna, who was watching him closely. He reached back and unhooked something from the roof; a large crucifix swung down. ‘For when I’m supposed to be saying Mass from the back of the Jeep. She thinks I’m doing a Billy Graham down here in Bolivia – I’m waiting for her to send down one of Ringling Brothers’s old tents.’

‘Not an old one, surely. Wouldn’t she buy a new one?’ Then he pulled off his cap and scratched his head, a habit he had when embarrassed. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t talk about your mother like that. She obviously means well.’

‘Too well,’ said McKenna, but his voice was flat of any emphasis. He started up the Jeep and they drove out of the yard and down the road. ‘Why don’t you come to the Ruiz’s with me now? I can introduce you.’

Taber hesitated, then shook his head. ‘You know how formal these criollos are You don’t just drop in on them.’

‘I’ll explain the circumstances, that you helped me save Jesu Mamani from the lake. It will give them something to talk about. All they have to live on is gossip.’ He looked directly at Taber and again there was the eagerness: ‘Come with me! I can face them better with someone to back me up.’

‘What are they – holdovers from the Inquisition or something?’

McKenna grinned, embarrassed in his turn. ‘They’re medieval – or damned near it. The original Ruiz came over here from Spain about ten years after Pizarro – and these Ruiz think that time was the high spot of world history. They live in the past, every one of them thinking he’s the ghost of some conquistador. At one time they owned all the silver mines around, but that was over a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago. They lost them some time after Bolivar liberated the country. After that they owned only land, but they had enough of that, something like five thousand square miles of it. They lost most of that in the 1952 revolution – they still own some up beyond the lake that the government, somehow, never got around to parcelling up amongst the campesinos – but they’re still the wealthiest family in this part of the country and they’ve got fortunes salted away in Switzerland. Whoever happens to be in power up in La Paz still listens to them. I think maybe what makes me uncomfortable when I’m with them is that they should be finished, that they’re an anachronism today, yet they still have power.’

‘I thought you’d be used to that.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘You’ve just described your Church.’

‘Put your needle away,’ said McKenna. ‘I’ll bet there are some FAO guys who should be defrocked for saying the same thing about your organization. You might make a good heretic yourself.’

‘It’s funny, both of us having our headquarters in Rome. I wonder if the Pope and my boss ever ring each other for advice?’

McKenna laughed. ‘It’s a thought. But watch your heresy where we’re going. One of the Ruiz, Alejandro’s second brother, is my immediate boss. He’s the Bishop of San Sebastian.’

They came into Altea. At a distance it looked like a landslide of huge boulders in the shallow ravine in which it lay; the thatched roofs could have been dead scrub that had been carried down in the same slide, except that none of the surrounding slopes grew any scrub. Only the whitewashed tower of the adobe church, rising above the jumble of huts like a pinnacle of dirty ice, was a landmark; the rest of the village was part of the landscape, washed by the rain and scoured by the wind into the dun-coloured slopes of the ravine. In a vague way it reminded Taber of the hovels in the villages on the Anatolian plateau of Turkey; in his imagination poverty itself had become dun-coloured. In the landscape of his memory Altea would eventually run into a hundred other places.

McKenna brought the Jeep to a halt beside a Land-Rover. Taber got out, found his driver, gave him the three salmon, then came back and climbed into the Jeep again. As he did so, a short, fat priest in a shabby black soutane went by. McKenna spoke to him, but the priest ignored him and hurried on to disappear into the shabby hovel of a church. They match each other, Taber thought, the priest and the church.

‘He didn’t look too friendly,’ he said as McKenna drove down the rutted street. Half a dozen llamas, herded by a small boy playing on a quena pipe, came out of a side alley and McKenna had to brake sharply. The llamas passed in front of them, turning inquisitive heads on their long elegant necks, their soft eyes reproachful; then the small boy went past, his music as melancholy as the day which had now turned grey. McKenna drove on out of the village.

‘I’ve trodden on that priest’s toes a few times. He’s a mestizo – they’re the ones, I find, who can never make up their minds about foreigners.’

‘Half-bloods are the same anywhere. What’s his grudge against you?’

‘I made the mistake of baptizing some of the children for free. He believes in resale price maintenance, I think you British call it. That’s how he makes his living, charging for baptisms and weddings and funerals. He’d starve to death on what the Church pays him up here. It’s damned difficult for me. Most of these campesinos can’t afford to pay for the graces of the Church, but what do I do? Put that guy out of business?’

‘Are the Indians willing to pay?’

‘That’s the irony of it – yes. They’re like the snobs back home in the States – if it’s for free, it can’t be any good.’

A squall of rain came on the wind, shutting out the countryside for a few minutes; then abruptly they drove out into bright sunshine. Taber was learning that this was how the weather was in these high sierras; he would learn, too, that men’s tempers were the same. The altiplano stretched ahead of them, brown and bleak, drawing their gaze till their eyes ached with the stretching. In the far distance herds of llamas and alpaca moved slowly like cloud-shadow in the clear glare, their very insubstantiality adding to the emptiness of the landscape. The rutted road ran straight as a rod for five or six miles, encountering neither fence nor house that would have caused it to bend.

‘This was all Ruiz land at one time,’ said McKenna. ‘You think you could get anything to grow on it?’

‘I’m no miracle worker,’ said Taber, staring unhopefully out at the barren land. ‘But down in Australia they turned a desert into a wheat-field. There’s always the chance—’

‘No point in growing wheat up here. Isn’t there a world surplus? They want a cash crop they can export.’

‘Who doesn’t?’ said Taber, who had heard the same suggestion everywhere he had worked.

The Jeep bumped along the road, seeming to make no headway in the landscape that offered no perspective. Once, some distance off to their left, they saw an Indian woman sitting in the middle of nowhere: no llamas, no alpaca, not even a dog, only she sitting there, a human cairn marking the loneliness.

‘You wonder what they think about,’ said McKenna.

‘Perhaps nothing. If you don’t know anything, what’s to fire your imagination?’

‘You’re mistaken if you think their intelligence isn’t much above the animal level.’

‘I didn’t say that.’ Taber slumped in the corner of the seat, took off his cap and scratched his head. But he did not look embarrassed this time, only sad. ‘But sometimes I think the poor buggers would be better off it that was their level.’

Then the road curved and began to dip and soon they were riding on tarmac. A wide bowl opened up in the altiplano and there at the bottom of it was San Sebastian. The road went down in a series of bends, starting where the airport had been built on the very edge of the bowl. As they passed the airport an old DC-3 took off, already airborne 2,000 feet as it left the end of the runway and flew out over the city. The Jeep went down round the bends, came to a level where a thin forest of Australian red gums grew on each side of the road.

‘They were planted by the British, when they owned the railroad,’ McKenna said. ‘The early locos were wood-burners.’

‘Those gums look pretty good. Why don’t they try planting some up on the altiplano as windbreaks?’

McKenna shrugged. ‘The people down here don’t care what happens up there. The Indians have been wind-blown for centuries – why change it? Even the Indians themselves seem to have the same idea. I‘m trying to get a few saplings going in back of my place, but the Indians just look at them and shake their heads. I’m the nutty one, not them.’

A ramshackle truck, loaded high with a mixed freight of crates, tyres and half a dozen Indian women perched high on top like a covey of coots, went rattling by, its brakes shrieking as it came to a bend but doing nothing to decrease its speed. Somehow or other the driver negotiated the curve, going with-in a foot of the edge of the road and a thousand-foot drop, then tearing on towards the next bend. Taber and McKenna looked at each other and shook their heads. There was nothing to say: each of them had seen the results of such decrepit trucks and such drivers.

The road straightened out, became the main street of the city, running through to the main plaza. The traffic thickened: a few modern cars, but most of its cars ten, twenty, thirty years old and trucks that looked even more ancient: to Taber it was like travelling through a big moving junk yard. They swung round the plaza, past the eucalyptuses, the occasional pine and the tall column with the golden condor perched atop it and the boy bootblacks clustered round its base like starlings. They passed the cathedral, baroque as a religious nightmare; gold-leafed saints looked out in agony from niches in the walls; between the two tall domed towers was a minaret, as if the sixteenth century builder, brought here from Spain, had not been able to deny his Moorish blood. They went past a mansion half-hidded behind tall railing gates (‘The Bishop’s palace,’ said McKenna. ‘Whose else?’ said Taber), turned down a side street and came to a smaller plaza. There were no shops or public buildings here; Taber recognized at once that this was a residential plaza and a very restricted one. A fountain dribbled lethargically in the centre of the square and a few Indians sat round it, their backs to it, their blank, indifferent faces staring across at the high walls surrounding the plaza. In each wall was a pair of tall wooden gates, the barriers between two worlds.

McKenna pulled the Jeep up outside the biggest of the gates. They got out and crossed to a small door let into the gates. There were two iron knockers, each in the shape of a mailed fist, one at face level for the caller on foot, one at a level for a caller on horseback: this was a house that had known visitors for centuries. McKenna clanged the lower knocker and almost immediately the door was opened by an unsmiling Indian houseboy. Taber followed the priest in under the massive gates to a courtyard in which stood four Cadillacs, none of them less than twenty years old.

‘Since the revolution,’ said McKenna in a low voice, ‘they don’t advertise their wealth so much here at home. They go to Europe every year – they keep a Rolls-Royce there.’

‘Four Cadillacs?’ Taber had taken off his cap and was trying to comb his hair with his fingers. Alongside the now spruce McKenna he looked a trifle unkempt. He had a natural contempt for people who concerned themselves with clothes, but he had learned to make concessions to the criollos’ sense of formality. He always carried a tie with him, but today he had left it in the Land-Rover.

‘One of them is the Bishop’s. I don’t know why the Ruiz have all three of theirs out of the garages. Maybe they’re going up to La Paz. They usually take their servants with them – they have a house up there, too.’

‘I think I’d better back out now. Go back to the hotel, come another day when my socialist hackles are lying down flat.’

‘Too late. Start smiling and acting feudal.’

The iron-studded front door, adorned with another mailed fist knocker, had swung open. An Indian butler in white jacket and white gloves stood waiting for them. Taber had only time to notice that the house was a large two-storied Spanish colonial building before he was ushered with McKenna into a hall that rose to the full height of the house. The walls were panelled and hung with tapestries; Pizarro, ugly and vicious, galloped round the hall in pursuit of Atahualpa; Christ, Taber thought, can’t these people recognize the real hero? Two suits of conquistador armour, helmets and breastplates, hung on rods, stood like steel scarecrows at the foot of a wide curving staircase. A balcony ran round three walls and above it the thick beams of the roof were lost in a gloom that Taber imagined had been gathering for centuries. The hall set the period for the house and the family: as McKenna had said, the Ruiz lived in the past.