Mask of the Andes

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.’

Chapter Two

1

The driver pulled up the Land-Rover outside the railway station and Taber and Pereira got out. A blind Indian woman, led by a small girl, came shuffling towards them; the child guided the claw of a hand up to the coin that Pereira dropped into it. A policeman, dark eyes blank under the stiff vertical peak of his cap that seemed to be an extension of the planes of his face, stood by the kerb but made no attempt to move the beggar woman on. He was an Indian, too: criollos and gringos were fair game.

‘Begging is against the law,’ said Pereira as he and Taber went on into the big deserted hall of the station. ‘But no one ever takes any notice of it, least of all the minions of the law.’

Miguel Pereira was a chubby little man in his mid-thirties with a handlebar moustache, bad breath that he constantly sweetened with mints, and a vocabulary derived from a library of Victorian English novels. He had graduated as an agronomist from the University of San Marcos in Lima, then had had an extra year at Texas A & M on an American grant. He had come back to San Sebastian, married a local girl and now had four children and two jobs. He was the government agricultural adviser and, under a pseudonym that everyone knew of, he also managed the largest cinema in town.

‘It is the only way one can survive,’ he had told Taber when the latter had arrived a week ago. ‘The government does not reward its devoted minions. I grew up as a child expecting a life of comfort – my family were of wealthy means. But we lost all that in the revolution – we were not as fortunate as some people. I was suddenly thrown on the world—’ He had spread dramatic hands; Taber listened for violins, but heard none. ‘When one is born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth, one finds it difficult to adapt to a life of penury. Luxury is in the blood, don’t you think?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ said Taber mildly. ‘It’s quite a while since I’ve had a blood test.’

‘A sense of humour!’ Pereira clapped his hands together as if Taber had just announced a World Bank grant for penurious agronomists. ‘The sign of an educated man. We are going to be very amicable colleagues, Senor Taber. You will be my guest any night you wish at the cinema. Tonight, perhaps? We are showing Rosemary’s Baby, a jolly comedy about witchcraft in New York. The campesinos will love it, though they may find it a little unsophisticated.’

‘Some other time. I like Westerns.’

‘Who doesn’t?’ Pereira put his hands on his plump hips as if he were about to draw six-guns. ‘John Wayne. The campesinos flock to see his movies. They are waiting for the one where he is shot in the back by an Indian or a Mexican bandit. I await with dread the night it happens. They will burn down the cinema in celebration.’

Now, in the station, he said, ‘This way to the Customs chief. His name is Suarez – he is a very difficult man.’

‘They always are,’ said Taber, with memories of other Customs chiefs in a dozen other countries. ‘It’s in their blood.’

‘A sense of humour!’ Pereira burbled admiringly. ‘How it makes life bearable!’

Their footsteps echoing hollowly on the stone floor, they walked across the wide main hall. Only four trains a week now arrived at and departed from San Sebastian; the station was a monument from and to the past; it had been superseded by the still half-constructed airport terminal up on the altiplano. Birds flew in and out through the upper reaches of the high domed roof, the only arrivals and departures for today. From the hall Taber could see the empty platforms stretching away down towards the marshalling yards, currents of rust showing clearly in the river of rails. In the yards two ancient engines, British made at the turn of the century, shunted some equally ancient wagons back and forth as if the drivers were intent only on keeping the stock rolling, otherwise they would be out of a job. I’m in another museum, Taber thought.

Suarez’s office was like that of the director of a museum. Yellowed sheets of regulations hung on the wall like ancient scrolls; a Wanted smuggler stared out from a poster like a cave dweller. Suarez himself was a dapper mestizo with one eye that was walled and the other suspicious. He nodded without smiling and waited for Taber to make the opening remark. All right, you bastard, Taber thought, no pleasantries.

‘An FAO officer was here on a short visit three months ago. He recommended that sulphur, fertilizer and some other soil additives should be used around here. He ordered it and it was dispatched at once. Senor Pereira understands the shipment has now arrived.’

Suarez nodded, a barely perceptible movement. ‘Yes.’

‘Then we’d like to take delivery of it.’

‘That is impossible. The necessary papers have not arrived.’ He spoke Spanish with the correctness of someone who had had to learn it; Quechua had been his childhood language. These are the worst, Taber thought. The converts to a way of life were as dedicated as the converts to a religion.

‘I have the papers here with me. Duplicates.’

‘I must have the originals. They have not arrived.’

‘Where are they?’

Suarez shrugged, his good eye as blank as the other.

‘How long will they be arriving?’

Another shrug. Out in the yards the engines hooted: derisively, thought Taber, trying to hold on to his temper.

‘The chemicals are urgently necessary. The farmers need them.’

A third shrug. ‘The papers are also necessary.’

Taber looked around the office, wondering if it was worthwhile wrecking. But the steel cabinet, the plain table and chairs, the old rusty typewriter, were government issue: Suarez would probably be glad to have them replaced. Taber looked down at the dapper little man and wondered what the penalty would be for wrecking a corrupt Customs chief. Death, probably: the system had to be protected.

‘I shall write to La Paz at once and ask them to send the papers special delivery.’

Suarez shrugged yet again. ‘It will be no use hurrying them. They are notoriously slow and inefficient up in La Paz.’

‘Shall I quote you?’

For a moment the good eye flickered; then there was a fifth shrug. ‘As you wish.’