Mask of the Andes

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.’