Kitabı oku: «Mask of the Andes»

JON CLEARY

Mask of the Andes

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright Page

About the Publishers

Chapter One
1

McKenna straightened up from laying out the catch of fish and looked out across the lake. On the far side of the bright blue pan of water the mountains rose like crumpled iron, cold to the eye and the soul: gods as well as men had died in these ranges. Through a gap he could see the glacier, a white cataract frozen forever, coming down from the highest snowcapped peaks that stood against the stark sky. At this height in the Andes, McKenna could never think of the sky as being gentle. That was for less harsh climes, for other times, the sky of boyhood memory.

‘Padre—’ Agostino Mamani was fifteen, but no longer a boy. Here on the Bolivian altiplano, the Indian peasant, the campesino, was fortunate if he lived beyond forty: one could not waste too many years in childhood. ‘I have to go down to San Sebastian today.’

‘Why do you have to go, Agostino?’ San Sebastian was ten miles by road and 2,000 feet in altitude below the lake; it was not just a city but another world to the campesinos of Altea, the village half a mile down from the lake. ‘When did you last go to the city?’

Agostino shrugged: time was a dimension he did not understand. ‘A long time, padre. I was—’ He held out his hand opposite his hip; short and squat, no more than an American child’s height even now, he said, ‘I was just a small boy.’

‘Why do you have to go today?’

‘My mother has to see the doctor at the hospital.’

‘Has she been ill?’ McKenna remembered that he had not seen Agostino’s mother for almost a month. She was one of the more cheerful, intelligent and approachable of the village women, a plump bundle made even plumper by her voluminous skirts, a woman whose one sin, until recently, had been her vanity about her hats. Vance Packard’s status-seeking society had its pockets of competition even up here on the altiplano; poverty was no bar to conceit. Any campesino woman who had a different hat for each day of the week, as Maria Mamani had, had a top rating in Altea. The Joneses, McKenna had wryly noted, were a widespread family: everyone everywhere was trying to keep up with them. ‘Maybe I could drive you and your mother down in the Jeep? It would be no trouble.’

Agostino scratched a bare toe in the rocky earth. His flat, dark face lost all expression, became the mask that McKenna knew so well and hated so much. Sometimes, in his wilder moments of depressed fantasy, he imagined he was surrounded only by masks, that behind the dark faces of the Indians there were no skulls, no brains, nothing. ‘My mother and I will catch the bus, padre.’

McKenna recognized he was being shut out, but he persisted. Back home in California, though never shy, he had always been careful of other people’s reticences; Americans, though the most confessional of people, could be violently jealous about those things they did not want to expose. But a missionary could not afford such courtesies. He had come to know, a little too late perhaps, that a missionary, if he was to be a successful one, had to be something of a busybody. Besides, he always had the feeling he was doing too little for the campesinos, that if he could not help them more than they had so far allowed him to, he might as well pack up and go home. So he forced his help on them, grabbing at straws: even the offer of a lift in the Jeep would be a plus mark in the day’s good works.

‘That’s crazy, Agostino. The bus is always full and it’s so – so dangerous.’ He knew that was no argument at all; the campesinos boarded the ancient rickety buses with a stoic disregard of the fact that they might never complete their journey. He tried another tack: ‘If your mother is ill, she would be more comfortable in the Jeep.’

‘No, padre.’ His face still closed, Agostino stared out across the lake.

McKenna was about to give up, but tried once more. He had had a sudden thought and he could hear the disappointment in his voice as he asked, ‘Is she going to have a baby, Agostino? Is that why she is going to the doctor?’

‘I don’t know, padre.’ Agostino was not embarrassed by the question; in the two-room adobe hut that was home, the facts of life had never been a secret to him. ‘How should I know that?’

McKenna gazed at the young Indian, but the mask was shut against him: Agostino was going to tell him nothing. He turned and looked out at the lake again, wondering, as he had so many times since coming here nine months ago, if and when he would ever be fully accepted by the Indians. Dear God, he prayed, why did you make the bastards so sullen? For Christ’s sake, as the saying goes, inject them with a little of the grace of co-operation.

He continued to stare out across the lake, trapped, as he always was, by his inability to walk away from an unresolved situation. Maybe, he thought, only the successful can make exits. His father had been a successful man and had made successful exits, from Bolivia, from his family, from life. He had got out of Bolivia when the price for silver was high and foreigners had still been tolerated. He had walked out on his wife and children while he was still virile enough to attract other women. And he had exited from life with a panache that his son could never hope to equal: he had plunged into San Diego harbour in his private plane on a day when the stock market had hit an all-time peak. Only failures, McKenna thought, stumble around looking for ways out.

So he stared at the landscape, seeking distraction in it while he hoped Agostino would move off up to the mission. He heard the dull boom as the fishermen out on the lake dynamited for fish; then he saw the cauldron of water bubble up between the three boats. He never dynamited for fish himself and he wished the local Indians had never discovered the method; there were two men in the village who had stumps for arms and he was always expecting a major tragedy, two, three or half a dozen deaths. The water settled and the boats moved in to collect the stunned and dead fish as they floated to the surface.

A flight of coots planed down towards the water, a black arrowhead that was suddenly studded with bright coral as the birds turned and the still-rising sun caught their vivid feet. An Andean gull, an intruder in the totora rushes where the coots built their nests, rose up and winged away in the gust of wind that abruptly slapped at the lake’s surface. McKenna saw the three small fishing boats, all of them made from totoras, rock violently.

He turned to Agostino, who had not moved. ‘You better tell your father and others to come in,’ he said, his voice sharper than he had intended. Damn the kid, why did he have to make things so difficult?

Agostino looked out at the three men, each of them alone in his frail craft. ‘A son does not tell his father what to do, padre.’

McKenna sighed, gave up: his Irish father had had exactly the same philosophy. ‘Okay, Agostino, you win.’

For a moment the boy’s mask broke; he looked puzzled. McKenna, trying to struggle out of the web of talk, mutely waved to him to pick up the fish and take it up to the mission. The Quechua language, which McKenna had taken such pains to re-learn, had its own wry notes, but he still found conversation with the Indians had its limitations. At times he felt it was like walking on loose snowshoes across a field of chilled custard. Or like talking to his own mother.

He shook his head, half-angrily, as he thought of her. She would have gone to bed last night with her usual prayers for himself and his sister Carmel: the prayers for him thanking God that he was a priest, those for Carmel asking Him to drive the devil out of her. Nell McKenna broadcast her prayers as if they were gossip; the Lord, if He didn’t hear them direct, must always pick them up somewhere along the grapevine. Nell would be rising in a few hours, her lips pursed with piety even before she had put in her expensive dentures, the first thing she did every morning. It was her belief that no lady was ever seen without her teeth, not even by her husband or her children; with the slackening of standards, hats and gloves were no longer de rigueur for ladies, but teeth were another matter. She would dress as carefully as for a Papal audience and go to the church in Beverly Hills where she took daily communion. Later in the day she might drive downtown to Los Angeles and have coffee with the cardinal, the two of them sitting there discussing a Church from which McKenna, the adored son, the one the Lord had blessed her with, felt he was fast slipping away.

Agostino had already gone up to the mission with as many fish as he could carry. They had gone out just before dawn, when the lake had still been silver under the last light of the moon, and the catch this morning had been bigger than usual. The lake abounded in fish and the villagers of Altea saw that no strangers came to fish it dry; even the citizens of San Sebastian had been warned off. During the revolution of 1952 the campesinos had all been given rifles and they had never returned them; some of the old revolutionaries from San Sebastian, grown fat and bourgeois now, did not appreciate the irony of looking down the barrels of guns they had handed out in the cause of freedom. But that was what they had met when they had come up here to try some fishing, and finally the message had been recognized: the lake fishing was only for the villagers of Altea. It had been McKenna’s first sign of acceptance, limited though it was, when he had been allowed to join Agostino’s father, Jesu Mamani, in one of the totora boats and throw out a line. When he had had a boat of his own shipped up from Antofagasta, a fibreglass skiff to which he had fitted a small outboard motor, one or two rifles had been brought out again; but Jesu Mamani, after some deliberation, had ordered them put away. McKenna was allowed to fish so long as he kept the catch only for himself. Fish and potatoes were the villagers’ only cash crops and they wanted no competition from outsiders.

As McKenna straightened up with the last of the fish catch, four large salmon, he felt another gust of wind, much stronger than the first. At the same time there was another dull boom, as a second stick of dynamite was exploded. Instinctively he looked out towards the lake, squinting against the wind’s force. He saw Jesu Mamani, standing up in his boat, sway, then bend over to clutch at the boat’s side. The tiny craft rocked, then tilted as the water seemed to rise under it. Mamani went over the side without a cry, almost as if his plunge were intentional; the boat took in water, tilted further, then turned over and sank. The two fishermen in the other two boats swung round and McKenna waited for them to row towards the drowning Mamani; but each of them sat stockstill, staring across the choppy water at the floundering man, but making no attempt to save him. In another minute or so McKenna knew Jesu Mamani would be beyond saving.

He dropped the fish, leapt at the skiff’s rope and wrenched it from the mooring post. He caught a glimpse of Agostino, now half-way back down the slope from the mission, and he yelled at him to run. But the boy had stopped, stood absolutely motionless, staring with the same frozen look as that of the two fishermen at his drowning father. As McKenna scrambled into the skiff he yelled again at Agostino, but already he knew there would be no help from that quarter. Or from anywhere.

The motor barked into life at once. On full throttle McKenna bounced the skiff over the uneven water; he had no more than fifty yards to travel but it seemed ten times that distance. Mamani had disappeared beneath the surface, but his head and flailing arms suddenly broke into view again as McKenna skidded the skiff to a halt among the dead fish that had floated up from the sunken boat. McKenna cut the motor, jumped to the front of the skiff and reached out to the hand that clutched desperately at his. As he felt the frenzied fingers tear at his hand, McKenna also felt the cold that was already killing the man: the hand that clutched his was like a jagged piece of ice. Mamani’s eyes were wild and white in a face that was now almost black; his mouth was wide open, but there was no air left in him for any sound. Frantically McKenna pulled the man towards him; the skiff tilted and for one awful moment he thought he was going to join the Indian in the freezing water. He flung himself backwards, still hauling on Mamani’s arm; he could feel his chest heave and tighten as both the thin air and fear caught at him. Oh God, help me! His eyes seemed to be bursting from their sockets as he struggled to pull Mamani from the water; then through his fractured stare he saw the Indian’s other hand take hold of the side of the skiff. McKenna lay back praying for strength that he knew wouldn’t be his own, that he would have to borrow from faith. He reached behind him, wrapped his arm round the cross-seat, gave one last agonizing tug that seemed to burst his chest, and fell back into the bottom of the skiff as the cold, sodden bundle of Mamani tumbled in on him.

McKenna lay gasping, every breath like a gulped mouthful of powdered glass. He could feel something warm on his upper lip and knew his nose was bleeding, something that hadn’t happened to him for a long time, not since he had become accustomed to the 13,000 feet altitude here on the altiplano. His head was splitting apart and his eyes were almost blind. But, though only half-conscious, he still knew whose was the desperate plight. Somehow or other he managed to roll out from under the unconscious Mamani. He struggled up on to his knees, feeling the iron vice that wrapped his chest, and crawled to the back of the skiff. Still unable to see properly, he fumbled for the starter of the motor. He made three grabs at it before he found it; beyond praying, cursing now, he jerked it savagely, half-expecting the motor just to cough and die on him. The motor did cough, then it sent the skiff shooting towards the shore.

It went past the two Indians in their totora boats, its wash rocking them dangerously. They stared at McKenna, but he did not look at them. He drove the skiff straight on into the shore, cutting the motor a fraction too late so that they hit the rocky beach with a thump hard enough to send him sprawling forward on to the still inert Mamani.

He picked himself up, dimly aware that he had scraped his knees and knuckles. He was still having difficulty getting his breath and his head felt as if it had been cleft by an axe, but he had got back some of his strength and he could once more see clearly. He stumbled over the side of the skiff, feeling the icy water bite at his ankles as he stepped into it, and hitched the rope round the mooring post. As he turned back, wondering if he would have the strength to lift Mamani out of the boat, a voice said in English, ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

He looked up at the stranger who had appeared out of nowhere. He had an impression of a tall thin man in a checked tweed cap and a bright red quilted jacket, but there was no time to take further stock of the newcomer. McKenna clambered back into the skiff, grabbed at Mamani’s wet clothes that felt as if they were already turning to ice under the now constant wind, and heaved the Indian into a sitting position. As he pushed Mamani towards the outstretched arms of the stranger he said, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’

‘I’ll bet you are. Where do we take him? If he’s worth taking anywhere—’

‘What d’you mean by that?’ McKenna straightened up.

‘Don’t waste time.’ The stranger spoke as if he were used to authority, to not having people argue with him. ‘I mean if he’s still alive. The poor bugger should be dead.’

They carried Mamani up the slope to the mission. McKenna was a stocky man of medium height, and the stranger, bony rather than thin, as McKenna had first thought, was three or four inches over six feet; they made a poor team as they struggled up the slope with the unconscious Indian between them. They stopped once for McKenna to wipe his nose, but the bleeding had already begun to dry up. As they came to the still motionless Agostino, McKenna gasped at him to run up and put buckets of water on the fire. The boy stared at the limp heap that was his father, and McKenna, wheezing for words to curse at him, thought he wasn’t going to move. Then abruptly Agostino spun round and went running up the slope.

By the time McKenna and the stranger, with their burden, had reached the mission, a dozen or more Indians had materialized out of the bare rocky landscape. They stood in a silent expressionless group at the gate as McKenna and the stranger carried Mamani in through the rough rock wall of the compound and into the larger of the two adobe huts that made up the mission. Passing them, McKenna thought, was like walking past a jury.

Mamani, his face a dark blue death mask with a dribble of water running from a corner of the almost black lips, was laid on the single bed in the small inner room of the hut. McKenna was about to strip the Indian of his clothing, but the stranger gently pushed him aside. ‘Let me do it. You’ve done enough.’

McKenna moved back, all at once glad to have someone else take over. It was not just that he wanted to be relieved of any further physical effort, though God knew he welcomed that: he was on the point of collapse and he knew he was going to be sick if his headache did not ease soon. But more than anything else he suddenly wanted to be relieved of responsibility; or at least have someone share it with him. None of the Indians was going to do that. He sank down on to a chair and looked at the faces, still as stone, that filled the doorway. The Indians, including the two fishermen from the lake, had crowded into the outer room and stood staring in at the stranger as he quickly peeled off Mamani’s clothing, covered the seemingly dead man with a blanket, then bent down and began to give the kiss-of-life. A small child, only its eyes showing among the undergrowth of legs in the doorway, giggled, but was abruptly cuffed into silence. The tall man had taken off his cap, showing a mop of thick dark red hair. He was working his mouth against Mamani’s, occasionally pulling his head back to look at the Indian. After a few minutes he glanced across at McKenna.

‘He’s still with us. Get that kid in here with the hot water. And get that cheering crowd of spectators out of here before I murder the bloody lot of them!’

He glowered at the Indians, then went back to working on Mamani. McKenna, already feeling better, as if the stranger were breathing new life into him, stood up and ushered the campesinos ahead of him out into the yard. Then he went back inside and helped Agostino carry the old tin tub and several buckets of hot water into the bedroom. Mamani, covered by all four of McKenna’s blankets but still shivering, was conscious now, gazing unblinking at the roof but with the mask of his face scarred by a deep frown. He was alive, but it was difficult to tell whether he was puzzled, pleased or angry. Even he thinks we did the wrong thing, McKenna thought.

Mamani protested, shaking his head vigorously, as the stranger pulled the blankets from him and jerked a thumb at the steaming water in the tub. But the stranger was taking no argument. He grabbed Mamani by the shoulder and raised a large bony fist.

‘Get in there, you dirty bugger! This isn’t just to get you clean – we want the blood moving in you again. Get in!’

He had spoken in English, but Mamani, one eye on the fist close to his face, got the message. Abruptly he slid out of bed, still shivering, both hands cupped modestly over his genitals, and stepped into the water, flinching at the heat of it. The stranger put both hands on Mamani’s shoulders and pushed him down into it. The Indian let out a cry, struggled a moment, then suddenly relaxed. He lay back in the tub, his hands still in the September Morn position. McKenna held back his smile, knowing the extremes of modesty and immodesty, according to their moods, that the Indians could go to. Now was no time to offend Mamani.

‘I wonder when he last had a bath.’ The stranger, McKenna now realized, was English. His voice was flatter and more matter-of-fact than those of the few Englishmen, mostly junior diplomats, whom McKenna had met here in Bolivia. ‘One whiff of him is enough.’

‘Some of them never have a bath from the day they are born,’ McKenna said. The hot water had begun to open up Mamani’s pores and a slightly sickening odour came out of him. ‘Smell the coca weed coming out of him.’

‘I could taste it when I was working on him,’ said the stranger, and looked around for a place to spit as he curled his lips. He went outside, then came back and looked down at Mamani. ‘He’s going to live.’

Mamani lay in the water and looked up at his son, the priest and the stranger. ‘I am alive again,’ he said in Quechua.

McKenna leaned forward, desperate to know. ‘Does that please you, Jesu?’

Mamani stared up at him. God, McKenna thought, who would know that once, as kids, we had shared secrets? But now Mamani was as secretive as the rest of them, locked in against the world. The Indian said nothing for almost a minute, then at last he nodded. ‘Yes, padre.’

‘So it bloody well should,’ said the stranger in English; then in rough Quechua he added, ‘Gods are not always right.’

Mamani stiffened in the tub, glanced quickly at McKenna. The latter stood up, aware that the stranger was eyeing him expectantly. I’m in no mood for argument this morning, he thought. ‘It depends who judges them.’

The stranger grinned with good humour. ‘A good ecclesiastical answer.’ Then he looked back at Mamani and said in Quechua, ‘Rub, man, rub. The water will not hurt you.’

Mamani still lay stiffly in the tub. He flicked a glance at Agostino, but his gaze was concentrated on the tall man standing over him. I’m watching a man make an enemy, McKenna thought; and decided it was time to break up the scene. He moved towards the door, motioning the stranger to follow him. ‘Let’s have some coffee. You can get rid of the coca weed taste.’

The tall man hesitated, then picked up his cap from the bed and followed McKenna into the larger room. He sat down at the table in the middle of the room and looked about him while the priest went outside. He saw a dirt-floored room that appeared to be used partly for living, partly for worship, partly for schooling. A small wooden altar stood against one adobe wall; it could have been mistaken for an ordinary sideboard but for the small tabernacle and brass crucifix that rested on its top; a rough home-made prie-dieu stood in front of it. The centre of the room was taken up by the table and half a dozen uncomfortable wooden chairs. In one corner was a small upright piano, its castors resting in rusted cans full of water to keep it free from termites. On top of it were piled sheets of religious music and a stack of popular music: Bach and ‘Get Me To The Church On Time’ lay side by side; all the popular music looked old and tattered. In another corner was a blackboard with some simple Spanish words chalked on it; beside it stood a table on which were stacked some dog-eared exercise books. The stranger looked about him once more, shook his head, then sat back as McKenna came in with a pot of coffee and two tin mugs.

‘The kitchen’s next door. Some day I’m going to knock a hole in the wall, save myself going out in the wind and the rain.’

‘The whole place will crumble to pieces if you do.’

‘I know. That’s why I keep putting it off. Everything’s likely to crumble,’ he said, and looked across at the altar as if that, too, might turn to dust. Then he looked back at the stranger and put out his hand. ‘My name’s McKenna. Terence McKenna.’

‘Harry Taber. I’m from FAO.’

‘The Food and Agriculture Organization? You here to stay?’ McKenna pushed a cup of coffee across the table. He was trying to make up his mind about the newcomer. He welcomed anyone who spoke his own language; he doubted if he would ever be fluent enough in Spanish or Quechua to catch the nuances of conversation in those languages. Yet Taber had already suggested that he had nuances of his own, that he might be a hard man to know.

‘Depends.’ Taber sipped his coffee, scratched his red head with a large hand on which McKenna could see small sun cancers; this man had spent a good many years away from the gentle sun of his native England. He was not a handsome man, his face was too bony and his hooked nose too large for that, but he suggested a strength that might prove comforting to a lot of women; and maybe to a lot of men, too, McKenna thought. He did not move gracefully, but he had a sort of angular ease that conserved his energy. He was a man in his mid-thirties and the total impression of him was of someone who knew his own competence and had confidence in it. ‘I’m here to see if the locals really want some assistance or are just after another hand-out from the World Bank.’

‘They could do with some help. Real help, I mean.’

‘Who? The campesinos or the criollos?’

This man knows the situation, McKenna thought. It was the campesinos, the Indians, who needed the help, but they could only ask for it through the criollos, the Spanish-bloods. ‘How long have you been in Bolivia?’

‘Two weeks. I’ve just come down from La Paz. But I’ve had six years in South America. Brazil, Paraguay, Peru. I know the score.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘Whose side are you on? The campesinos’ or the criollos’?’

McKenna had never been asked that before, but he had had the answer for months. ‘The campesinos’.’

‘The Church is on the other side.’

‘Not entirely.’ His headache was gradually going, but it would come back if this argument kept on. ‘Whose side is FAO on?’

Taber smiled, raising his mug in acknowledgement. ‘A good question. Are you a Jesuit?’

It was McKenna’s turn to smile. ‘Do you think a Jesuit would live like this?’ He gestured at his surroundings.

‘Tell you the truth, I’m still trying to make up my mind whose side FAO is on.’

McKenna knew the Food and Agriculture Organization had a lot of dedicated men working for it and it did a tremendous amount of good; but like all divisions of the United Nations it suffered from the demands and prejudices of the member governments of the world body. Here in South America, where most of the governments were made up of criollos, the FAO, like the Church, had its problems.

‘What do you do here?’ Taber asked.

‘I’m trying to get a school started. About eighty per cent, maybe more, of the Indians up here on the altiplano are illiterate.’

‘How are you making out?’

McKenna shook his head. ‘It’s tough. I’m a foreign gringo – they naturally think I’m here to exploit them. These Indians have long memories – I think they still remember, as if they were alive then, what Pizarro did to them.’

Then Jesu Mamani and Agostino came into the room. Mamani had wrung out his wet clothes and put them back on. He was slightly taller than the average campesino and held himself very erect, as if determined not to be towered over by the two white men. Though his face was not expressive, there was a look of intelligence in his eyes that hinted that his mind had not become dulled by coca weed and misery.

McKenna went past him into the bedroom, came back with a blanket and threw it round the Indian’s shoulders. ‘Agostino can bring it back tomorrow. He says he is going down to the hospital in San Sebastian with his mother. Is she ill, Jesu?’

Mamani’s face closed up, just as his son’s had. ‘We do not know, padre. Thank you for what you did this morning.’

He included both men in his look. Then, followed by Agostino, he went out of the hut, across the yard and down the road towards Altea. McKenna stood at the door watching father and son going down the slope with the shuffling Indian run that never seemed to tire them, that could carry them thirty or forty miles a day without effort. It had been tireless runners like these who had been the messengers in the Inca days, who had kept the communications system going that had kept the empire together until the day of the Spaniards.

When McKenna turned back into the room Taber was gazing steadily at him. ‘Is that lake out there sacred to the Indians?’

‘Yes. Inti Huara, the daughter of the Sun, is supposed to have drunk from it.’

‘You did the wrong thing, then, dragging that bloke out of it.’

‘Don’t you think I know that?’ McKenna said angrily; he was not angry at Taber but at the superstitions he had to fight. ‘The lake is entitled to its victims – that’s why those other two fishermen wouldn’t help me. But what would FAO have done?’

Taber smiled. ‘Don’t tell me it was the Catholic Church went out in that outboard this morning. It could never respond that fast, not on this continent. It was McKenna went out there. Man, not priest.’

‘Would you have come with me if I’d seen you in time?’

‘Mate, I’m like you. I kid myself I’m civilized. I don’t like to see people die, especially because of superstition. Though you have plenty of that in the Church.’

‘We’re slowly getting rid of it,’ said McKenna, wondering why he felt so much on the defensive. But it was the old story: you could criticize as much as you liked from the inside, but you felt outsiders should mind their own business. God, he thought, I’m starting to sound like my mother.

‘Too slowly,’ said Taber, and stood up, putting on his cap. ‘Do they complain about that in the confessional?’

‘That’s one of the secrets of the confessional.’

Taber threw back his head and laughed, a much more full-bodied laugh than McKenna expected; he had come to think that Taber was capable of no more than a wry smile. ‘I think you and I might make this place interesting for each other. It seems to me it could be pretty bloody awful otherwise.’

‘That might describe it,’ said McKenna. ‘It can only get better, nothing else.’

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.

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.