Mask of the Andes

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.