Mask of the Andes

Carmel lay back in the wide canopied bed. Francisco came back, took off his dressing-gown and got into bed with her. He reached for her breast, but she stopped his hand, holding it against her rib cage. She was wearing wool pyjamas, something she had not worn since she had been a child; it was remarkable how virtuous and safe wool made you feel. She would have to recommend it to the Wool Secretariat or whatever it was, as another selling point. ‘I said no.’

‘You were gay enough tonight at the party. No sign of soroche.’

She knew that was the name for altitude sickness; she had a bottle of soroche pills on the table beside the bed. ‘It was the party that brought it on. Maybe I was too gay.’

He rolled away from her, lay flat on his back. ‘It is not because of Taber, is it?’

She laughed, genuinely amused. ‘You’re crazy, Pancho. My God, I haven’t even thought of him that way—’

‘He’s a man.’

He rolled back towards her, close to her, proving he was a man, too.

‘So’s your uncle the Bishop. So were fifty per cent of the guests tonight. I don’t mentally fall into bed with every man I meet, Pancho. You better watch your manners or you’re likely to get kicked where the stallion got the knife. Cojones, isn’t that what they’re called in Spanish?’

‘I do not like vulgar women.’

‘Said he, trying to put his hand between her legs. Pancho, I’m not going to let you make love to me—’

‘You have not stopped me before. Not even our first night.’

‘That was Paris. There was no soroche there.’ Nor love, either; only the making of love.

‘Most people are over soroche in a day or two. You have been here four days.’

‘Maybe today set me back. Most people don’t have bullets zipping close to them when they first arrive. I could have been killed, Pancho,’ she said with exaggeration, and felt a sick thrill at the thought: she would have died like her father, violently. Then she added maliciously, ‘I might have been, if it hadn’t been for Mr Taber.’

‘You were not in danger.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The guerrillas do not kill innocent bystanders.’

‘They killed an innocent policeman.’

‘One expects that. It’s the risk of being a policeman.’

She sat up in bed, suddenly warm with indignation. ‘You don’t care a damn about that poor man!’

‘Carissima—’

‘Don’t Carissima me! My God, you don’t put any value on a human life if it’s that of an Indian—’

‘I didn’t come to your room to discuss moral issues,’ he said stiffly; and despite her indignation she almost laughed. He got out of bed and put on his dressing-gown, tying the cord with the deliberateness of a comic opera general putting on his military gun belt. ‘I do value human life, that of Indians as well as my own. But would even a social worker discuss such things in bed with the woman he loves?’

Don’t be so pompous, Pancho. But she said gently, because she had never liked hurting her lovers, ‘You don’t love me, darling.’

‘Do you know what love is?’

Men can be cruel at three o’clock in the morning, she thought: that is when they reveal their true selves. And she had met so many three-o’clock-in-the-morning men. ‘Maybe not. But I’m a student of it. And it’s a much harder subject than history.’ She lay back in bed, pulling the old-fashioned quilted covers up to her chin. ‘Good night, Pancho. Some other time.’

He stood rigid for a moment, then he turned abruptly and went out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. She understood why he did not slam the door, as a North American man might have: he had to protect his machismo, he could not let the others in the house know that she had sent him packing. Poor Pancho, she thought; then cursed him for leaving the window shut and the heater on. She got out of bed, unplugged the heater and opened the window. She stood at the window for a moment looking up at the wall of the bowl in which the city lay. The moon was full and bright in a cloudless sky; it rested on the rim of the bowl like an open silver lid. Below it one side of the bowl glittered as if molten metal had been spilt into it; it was a moment or two before she realized that it was moonlight reflected from the corrugated-tin roofs of the shacks on the terraces round the bowl. The almost vertical slums, like a skyscraper of poverty laid against the steep slope, looked beautiful in this light; but she had seen them in daylight when she had been driven down through them from the airport. The Indians who lived in those shacks would never see their homes from this viewpoint.

She shivered and hurried back to bed. Curled in a ball, her hands between her knees, the way she had lain ever since she was a small child, she stared out the window, having pulled the curtains back so that she could see the silver flood creep slowly down the bowl. She felt the loneliness creeping back on her at the same steady rate, as if the loneliness and the moonlight were related. They were, of course; or anyway, loneliness and night. She rarely felt lonely in the daytime, except when she had been to bed with some man in the afternoon and he had got up and left her while there were still some hours of daylight left. Then dusk, the death of day, became even lonelier than the night. But generally the days had not been too bad, nor many of the nights. At least not till recently.

She had been lonely as a child, but she had been in her teens before she had properly recognized the symptoms. There had always been plenty of other children to ask her to their parties and to come to hers; she had been at a party the day her father had dived into San Diego harbour in his plane. That was the day she had at last recognized loneliness for what it was. Her mother had called for her and the two of them had ridden home in the big black limousine, she weeping, her mother praying silently, and Oscar, the chauffeur, sitting up front and watching them, his yellow eyeballs reflected in the driving mirror. She felt the loss of her father, but that had not in itself caused the sense of loneliness.

That had come when she had been alone in her room and had realized she had no one in whom she could confide the extent of her loss. Her mother would not listen to her, she knew; that afternoon in the car Nell McKenna had prayed for herself and her children, not for the departed soul of Patrick McKenna; so long as hell existed, it could have him. Carmel had not been able to talk to her brother; he had been away at his last year at school and had only come home for the funeral two days after she had needed him. She had lain there on the bed in exactly the same position as now, staring out the window at the Santa Monica hills vaporizing into the grey-brown smog, and thought of all the girls she knew, none of whom had ever exchanged a locked door, cross-your-heart-you-won’t-tell secret with her. She had exchanged presents and birthday and Christmas cards; but never confidences. And realized then that it had been all her own fault. She had never given anything of herself away to anyone. Not since her father had closed the door on her when she was four years old and gone off to live his own life.

That was all so long ago. She had lived her own life since then: on her own terms, though she would never confess that to Terry. But the loneliness had only grown bigger and more painful. And she had come to ask herself: had her father been full of unbearable loneliness when he had slammed his plane into the water? But Patrick McKenna had never been a man for writing notes, especially suicide ones. He had died incommunicado, as it were, leaving his wife and children four million dollars and not a word of farewell.

When I go, she had thought last month in Paris when the loneliness had become as agonizing as cancer in its terminal stages, I want someone to say farewell to. One should not leave the world without saying good-bye; you should always leave an echo, or what had been the point of living? She could not say farewell to her mother; she could barely bring herself to say hello; there would be no echo there. Then she had met Pancho and he had said, ‘I come from San Sebastian in Bolivia,’ and from out of the past had come an echo she had forgotten.

‘I’m your brother, and brothers are supposed to help. That’s the only reason for them, isn’t it?’

She could not remember the occasion or the reason; all she could remember was that Terry, twelve or thirteen then, had said the words. And so she had come to San Sebastian in Bolivia, not to have Pancho make love to her, but to find a brother whom she could say farewell to.

‘Do you know what love is?’ Pancho had asked her.

Yes, she said as she fell asleep, yes, yes, yes; but the definition escaped her in her dreams.

Chapter Three

1

McKenna woke with an erection. He lay in bed debating whether to douse it with prayer or cold water; but less than a minute after getting out of bed the freezing morning air had reduced him to flaccid modesty again. He dressed quickly, knelt down and hurriedly said his prayers; he was running late for Mass. ‘And, Father, keep me from such thoughts as I dreamed last night.…’

When Alejandro Ruiz had learned that his brother had invited McKenna to say first Mass at the cathedral, he had sent a message that McKenna was to stay overnight at the Ruiz house instead of returning to the mission after the party. McKenna had been thankful for the suggestion; he had not relished the idea of the twelve-mile drive in from the lake at five o’clock in the morning. At that time the campesinos were bringing in their trucks to the market, hurtling along the narrow roads without brakes or lights; the drivers themselves would be half-asleep and each journey completed safely was a miracle. McKenna was not a cowardly man, but he believed in percentages; sooner or later one of those trucks would wipe his Jeep right off the road if he kept thumbing his nose at the odds. If he was going to be a martyr and die in the cause of the Faith, he wanted to go out with more style than that.

He went quietly downstairs, carrying his small suitcase. That had been another present from his mother, an expensive Mark Cross piece of leather goods that his mother had brought back from New York, where she had gone to attend the funeral of Cardinal Spellman, a prelate whom she had never met but who she thought should have been Pope: she believed it inevitable and right that an American must one day be Pope. McKenna had done his best to scuff up the suitcase before arriving in Bolivia, but he had been very conscious of the sardonic glances cast at the suitcase by the priests at the mission up in La Paz where he had stayed for his first week.

The butler, unrecognizable in a black cardigan, a cast-off of his master’s that hung on his thin frame like a poncho, was already up. He let McKenna out the front door, then crossed the courtyard to open the big gates. McKenna drove the Jeep out, then pulled up sharply as he saw someone come out the front door and run across the courtyard after him. It was Carmel, dressed in slacks and a mink coat. Oh God, he thought, hasn’t our family ever heard of sackcloth?

‘I’ve decided to come to Mass. Okay?’

‘Of course,’ he said, and felt a sudden warmth that threw off the chill of the morning. ‘It’ll make it a personal Mass for me.’

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