Mask of the Andes

The butler, silent as the empty suits of armour, led the two men down a long passage, their footsteps echoing on the tiled floor, and into a room that at once struck Taber as a museum. He guessed that there was nothing in the long, high-ceilinged room that did not have its historical value; the New World had long since become the old. But there was no time to take note of any details. Five people were gathered in front of the huge stone fireplace. McKenna pulled up sharply, staring incredulously at the girl who was smiling at him. Taber, following on, bumped awkwardly into him. I knew it, he thought, we’ve come at the right time.

‘Padre McKenna, welcome.’ Alejandro Ruiz Cordobes came forward. He was a big man, not so tall as thick; he filled his stiff-collared white shirt and his dark expensive suit so that there seemed no room for creases. He had a heavy shock of grey hair and a thick grey moustache that was like a small bar of iron laid across his upper lip. He moved with almost comical deliberateness, as if no matter where he went, he went in dignified procession. But the smile for McKenna was genuine, not the grimace of formal politeness. He had spoken first in Spanish, but now he broke into fluent but accentuated English. ‘We have a surprise for you, as you can see – t asked you to come this morning. But first we must meet your friend.’

McKenna, flustered, introduced Taber with no reference to what had happened up at the lake. Ruiz took the Englishman by the arm and led him towards the group, none of whom had moved.

‘My wife. My brother, the Bishop. My nephew – but not the son of the Bishop.’ A beautiful set of dentures flashed beneath the iron bar. ‘My son Francisco, who has just today come home from the Sorbonne. And the surprise for Padre McKenna – Miss Carmel McKenna, his sister.’

Taber would need second looks to remember the others, but he had taken in Carmel McKenna at first glance. It could have been her beauty, which was striking; it could have been the modernity of her, which, in the room and against the conservative dress of the others, was also striking. Whatever it was, she had filled Taber’s eye, made her impression on him at once. Dark-haired and finely-boned, full-breasted in her grey cashmere sweater, long thighs showing beneath her tweed miniskirt, brown suéde boots reaching to just below her knees, she looked to Taber like one of those mythical creatures he saw in Vogue, a magazine he sometimes read because he found it funnier than Punch. Perhaps she was too full-breasted, too sexual, for that unconsciously sexless magazine; she was certainly too sexual for her present surroundings. Taber, irrationally, suddenly prudish, felt embarrassed for the Ruiz, embarrassed particularly for McKenna.

Carmel McKenna gave him a quick smile and a nod, pushed past him towards her brother. ‘Terry darling! God, it’s good to see you!’ Her voice was deep, but too loud, one that had been trained at cocktail parties. She grabbed her brother by the elbows. ‘Do you kiss a priest hello, when he’s your brother?’ Still holding McKenna by the elbows, she looked over her shoulder at the others. ‘I was in Rome in June – you know what the joke there was? Priests and nuns can kiss each other hello so long as they don’t get into the habit.’

She’s trying too hard, Taber thought: this room was no place for swingers. What the hell was she trying to prove? That San Sebastian was out of touch with the real world? But the Ruiz family was unconvinced or shocked: it was impossible to tell: their faces were as stiff as those of their Indian servants. McKenna did his best to cover up his sister’s gaffe. He leant forward, kissed her on the cheek and said, ‘I heard that one my first year in the seminary.’

Bishop Ruiz, as thick-bodied as his brother but bald, suddenly smiled, taking the tension out of the room. ‘We joked a lot when I was a young priest. Now—’ He spread a regretful hand, the ring on his finger glistening like a large drop of dark blood. There’s dark blood in all of them, Taber thought, remarking the high flat cheekbones in all four of the Ruiz men; they might dream of Spain long ago and of the conquistadores, but somewhere in the family’s history a Ruiz had been conquered by an Inca. The Bishop looked at Taber. ‘Do the bishops joke in England, Senor Taber?’

Taber was about to say that the bishops in England were a joke, but he checked himself. ‘I couldn’t say, sir. It’s quite a while since I swapped jokes with a bishop.’

Taber saw McKenna’s quick amused glance. And for the first time Carmel looked at him with interest. She raised an eyebrow and half-smiled, as if by some intuition she had understood that he was not a lover of bishops nor what they stood for. Then she put her arm in her brother’s and drew him towards Francisco Ruiz.

‘Pancho and I met at a party in Paris. When he said he came from Bolivia I at once thought of you. How long is it since we saw each other – four, five years? I called Mother and when she said you were near San Sebastian, I just had to come down here with Pancho—’

‘We are very happy to have Francisco home with us,’ said Romola Ruiz, with just enough emphasis on her son’s name to hint that she preferred it to the diminutive. She was a slim woman who had so far won out over the creeping erosion of middle age; there was no grey in her brownish-blonde hair and her handsome, rather than beautiful, face showed no trace of lines nor any vagueness along her jawline. She looked a woman who would have her own opinions and Taber guessed there might often be a clash of wills between her and her husband. ‘Where do you live, Senor Taber?’

‘Where FAO sends me, senora.’

‘You do not have a home in England?’ The Ruiz family and Carmel had been drinking coffee and now the butler brought cups for Taber and McKenna. Romola Ruiz poured from the big silver pot that looked as old as the rest of the room’s furniture.

‘My parents are dead, so their house is gone. And I’m unmarried.’ Or twice divorced, if you like; but he did not say that. He did not think the Ruiz would have a high opinion of divorce, especially with a bishop in the family. He tried for some graciousness, lying like a diplomat, which he was in effect but which he often forgot: ‘You have a beautiful home.’

Romola Ruiz surprised him: ‘It could be modernized. Museums are not for living in.’

‘This house is the continuum in our family,’ said her husband. He sat in an upright, leather-backed monk’s chair, one that had for three centuries supported Ruiz men in the same uncomfortable way. Taber guessed that few Ruiz women would have sat in it and certainly not Romola Ruiz. ‘It was built in 1580. The history of our country has passed through this room.’

‘My family came to San Sebastian only in 1825,’ Romola Ruiz told Taber. ‘Our house fell down in 1925. They don’t build them like they used to.’

Her husband smiled, but it was an effort. ‘It is my wife’s joke that her family are Johnny-come-latelies. But her ancestor who settled here was one of Bolivar’s principal lieutenants. He is honoured in our history.’ He looked with pride about the room. ‘This house is necessary. One needs something unchanging in this changing world.’

‘Perhaps Senor Taber would not agree with you,’ said the Bishop, who had chosen a comfortable couch on which to sit. He looked across at Taber, the non-religious non-ascetic who had found himself perched awkwardly in another monk’s chair. ‘You are here to change things, are you not, Senor Taber? Otherwise the FAO would not have sent you.’

‘Let’s say I’m here to try and help improve things.’

‘Improvement is change.’ Francisco Ruiz still stood in front of the big stone fireplace with the McKennas. He was a darkly handsome young man with his mother’s slim build and his father’s intensity that he had not yet learned how to control as the older man had. ‘Don’t you agree, Padre McKenna? The Church is trying to improve things by changing them.’

McKenna looked warily at the Bishop, who waved a permissive hand. ‘Go ahead, my son. We are always interested in what the younger generation has to say.’

‘Change must come,’ said McKenna, still wary. ‘It’s inevitable.’

‘You can’t hold progress back. Look at the emancipation of women,’ said Carmel, as emancipated as a woman was likely to be, short of taking over the dominant role in the sex act. And I shouldn’t put that past her, thought Taber.

‘What does Hernando think?’ said Romola Ruiz.

The nephew had been sitting on a third uncomfortable chair, his short legs dangling a few inches above the thick rugs that lay strewn about the tiled floor. He was a muscular young man, already destined to be bald like his uncle the Bishop, with a quietness about him that could have been shyness or that sort of arrogance mat did not need to be displayed because it was so sure of itself.

‘Everything must be seen in its context,’ he said in a deep voice that only just escaped being pompous. ‘We were supposed to have had progress here after the revolution. Have we had it?’

He sounds like a politician, thought Taber. He’s just said something and said nothing.

‘What exactly are you going to do here, Mr Taber?’ said Alejandro Ruiz, ignoring his nephew’s rhetorical question: he was one man who was not interested in what the younger generation had to say.

‘Well, I’m basically a soil scientist, so that’s my first job – to see what deficiencies there are in the soil around here and if something can be done to improve crops. But I’m also supposed to report on things in general – livestock, for instance. To answer the Bishop’s question, and if Senor Francisco is right about improvement being change – yes, I suppose I am here to change things.’

‘The Indians resent change,’ said Alejandro Ruiz, sitting upright in his chair like a judge delivering sentence. ‘We are called reactionaries by outsiders, but it is not that we are against change just for our own sakes. We are realists, we see things, as my nephew puts it, in their context. The Indians are far more reactionary than we are, Senor Taber. I think Padre McKenna will have discovered that in the short time he has been here. We Ruiz have learned it over four hundred years.’

Taber had heard this argument all over South America; it was an argument that had its echoes from history all over the world. It had a degree of truth in it, but then men in general hated change: necessity, and not the desire for a better neighbourhood, had driven Early Man out of his cave and into villages. But it was too early yet to set up antagonisms; they would come soon enough. He did not want to have to depart before he had unpacked his bags.

‘What were you studying at the Sorbonne?’ asked McKenna, changing the subject and looking at Francisco. Everyone was still throwing smiles into his conversation, like sugar into bitter coffee, but a certain tension hung in the room.

‘History,’ said Francisco, and looked at his cousin. ‘You should go there, Hernando. If only to meet girls like Carmel.’

‘I wasn’t studying history, darling,’ said Carmel.

‘What were you studying?’ asked Romola Ruiz.

‘Life,’ said Carmel. ‘And men.’

Don’t try so bloody hard, said Taber silently. There’s no one with-it in this room, not even me; you’ll get no converts among this lot.

‘There is no better place to study men than South America,’ said Romola Ruiz; Taber was not surprised, coming now to expect the unexpected from her. ‘It is one of the last male strongholds, except of course in the animal world.’

Alejandro Ruiz smiled a snarl at his wife; it reminded Taber of lions he had seen in East Africa when they were hungry. ‘My wife likes her little joke. But ask Jorge, my dear – he will tell you that men everywhere are the same in the confessional.’

But the Bishop was too shrewd to be drawn into a domestic argument. ‘I have only sat in the confessional in South America.’

‘And am I not right, Jorge?’ Romola Ruiz would never surrender without a fight.

Jorge Ruiz rubbed the ruby of his ring. ‘Ah, that is one of the secrets of the confessional, Romola.’

Taber looked up at McKenna and the two men winked at each other; Carmel caught the wink and once again looked with interest at Taber. He stared back at her, then abruptly winked at her, too. She looked puzzled for a moment, tilting her head to one side, then she smiled and winked back. Neither of them had communicated anything to each other, the winks were meaningless, but a door had been unlocked, if not opened between them. Then Taber looked away and saw that both Francisco and Hernando had been watching them. Hernando’s face was expressionless, but Francisco’s was fierce with jealousy. I’ve just trodden on his balls, Taber thought, bruised his machismo.

Taber stood up. ‘I must be going, Senor Ruiz. I have intruded long enough. I only came because Padre McKenna insisted—’

‘He helped me save an Indian from the lake,’ said McKenna.

‘Actually dragged him out of the water?’ said Alejandro Ruiz. ‘They’ll never forgive you for that.’

Taber was going to deny that he had had anything to do with the actual rescue of Jesu Mamani, but he let it go. If you did not believe in superstition, you should not make an issue of it.

‘They’ve spent the last four hundred years not forgiving people for what has been done to them. One more won’t matter.’

Then he realized what he had said, where he was. He scratched his head and determined to get out of here before he trod on more toes, balls or whatever else got in his way. The Food and Agriculture Organization had never chosen their field workers for their diplomacy alone, but in him it had landed itself with a man whose tongue was fluent in everything but diplomacy. He could speak English, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili, Portuguese, Spanish and some rough Quechua, but he had an awkward, treacherous tongue in the soft-soap language of social goodwill. He retreated towards the door, somehow managing not to look as embarrassed as he felt. These Ruiz were wrong in their outlook, but he did not have to tell them that in their own home, the last fortress they had.

‘I hope we may meet again, Senor Ruiz.’

‘We shall,’ said Alejandro Ruiz flatly; he had not missed Taber’s gaffe. ‘If you are trying to bring change to this part of the world, it is inevitable we shall meet again, Adios.’

Taber nodded to the other men, bowed his head to Romola Ruiz and Carmel McKenna, and escaped. As he went down the long passage away from the room he heard Bishop Ruiz say, ‘He will learn, like everyone else who comes here. Bolivia has lessons for everyone.’

‘We shall teach him,’ said Alejandro Ruiz.

The voices faded, voices from the past.

3

‘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.’