Mask of the Andes

‘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.

‘History,’ said Francisco, and looked at his cousin. ‘You should go there, Hernando. If only to meet girls like Carmel.’

‘I wasn’t studying history, darling,’ said Carmel.

‘What were you studying?’ asked Romola Ruiz.

‘Life,’ said Carmel. ‘And men.’

Don’t try so bloody hard, said Taber silently. There’s no one with-it in this room, not even me; you’ll get no converts among this lot.

‘There is no better place to study men than South America,’ said Romola Ruiz; Taber was not surprised, coming now to expect the unexpected from her. ‘It is one of the last male strongholds, except of course in the animal world.’

Alejandro Ruiz smiled a snarl at his wife; it reminded Taber of lions he had seen in East Africa when they were hungry. ‘My wife likes her little joke. But ask Jorge, my dear – he will tell you that men everywhere are the same in the confessional.’

But the Bishop was too shrewd to be drawn into a domestic argument. ‘I have only sat in the confessional in South America.’

‘And am I not right, Jorge?’ Romola Ruiz would never surrender without a fight.

Jorge Ruiz rubbed the ruby of his ring. ‘Ah, that is one of the secrets of the confessional, Romola.’

Taber looked up at McKenna and the two men winked at each other; Carmel caught the wink and once again looked with interest at Taber. He stared back at her, then abruptly winked at her, too. She looked puzzled for a moment, tilting her head to one side, then she smiled and winked back. Neither of them had communicated anything to each other, the winks were meaningless, but a door had been unlocked, if not opened between them. Then Taber looked away and saw that both Francisco and Hernando had been watching them. Hernando’s face was expressionless, but Francisco’s was fierce with jealousy. I’ve just trodden on his balls, Taber thought, bruised his machismo.

Taber stood up. ‘I must be going, Senor Ruiz. I have intruded long enough. I only came because Padre McKenna insisted—’

‘He helped me save an Indian from the lake,’ said McKenna.

‘Actually dragged him out of the water?’ said Alejandro Ruiz. ‘They’ll never forgive you for that.’

Taber was going to deny that he had had anything to do with the actual rescue of Jesu Mamani, but he let it go. If you did not believe in superstition, you should not make an issue of it.

‘They’ve spent the last four hundred years not forgiving people for what has been done to them. One more won’t matter.’

Then he realized what he had said, where he was. He scratched his head and determined to get out of here before he trod on more toes, balls or whatever else got in his way. The Food and Agriculture Organization had never chosen their field workers for their diplomacy alone, but in him it had landed itself with a man whose tongue was fluent in everything but diplomacy. He could speak English, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili, Portuguese, Spanish and some rough Quechua, but he had an awkward, treacherous tongue in the soft-soap language of social goodwill. He retreated towards the door, somehow managing not to look as embarrassed as he felt. These Ruiz were wrong in their outlook, but he did not have to tell them that in their own home, the last fortress they had.

‘I hope we may meet again, Senor Ruiz.’

‘We shall,’ said Alejandro Ruiz flatly; he had not missed Taber’s gaffe. ‘If you are trying to bring change to this part of the world, it is inevitable we shall meet again, Adios.’

Taber nodded to the other men, bowed his head to Romola Ruiz and Carmel McKenna, and escaped. As he went down the long passage away from the room he heard Bishop Ruiz say, ‘He will learn, like everyone else who comes here. Bolivia has lessons for everyone.’

‘We shall teach him,’ said Alejandro Ruiz.

The voices faded, voices from the past.

3

‘You better get yourself some longer skirts.’

‘Oh God, Terry, don’t start talking like a priest!’

‘I’m not talking as a priest. But this isn’t Paris or Rome or wherever you’ve been these past five years. Women here are expected to be modest, at least in public—’

Carmel put a hand on McKenna’s arm. ‘I’m sorry, darling. All right, you win. I’ll buy some nice modest skirts today. I don’t want to spoil your image in front of the Bishop and your flock.’

McKenna grinned wryly. ‘It’s not my image I’m worried about – I don’t even know that I’ve got one.’

They were sitting out in a small patio behind the Ruiz house. A walnut tree leaned against its own sharp-edged shadow in one corner and ancient vines, just beginning to leaf, climbed like snakes to the rusted spikes that topped the high stone wall. The McKennas sat on a wooden bench in the brilliant sunlight in the centre of the patio. Carmel, though she wore dark glasses, kept glancing towards the shadow beneath the walnut tree.

‘We’ll sit over there if you like,’ said McKenna. ‘But you’ll freeze. At this altitude there’s a difference of twenty, twenty-five degrees between sunlight and shade.’

‘Pancho warned me to take it easy for a few days. I already have a headache. Is that usual?’

‘Pretty usual. You probably won’t sleep well, either, for the first few nights. You should’ve lain down for a couple of hours as soon as you got here – that helps your body adjust. But if you go tearing around – do you still tear around like you used to?’

She nodded. ‘I guess so.’

‘Why run so fast, Carmel?’ McKenna searched in his pockets, found his own dark glasses, put them on: as much a protection against her as against the glare. He and Carmel had never been particularly close even as children; the six years’ difference in their ages had been too big a handicap. He had gone away to prep school at twelve, then on to college; she had gone to a day school in Westwood, then persuaded her mother to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland. They had written each other spasmodically, but they had been the noncommittal letters of acquaintances rather than of blood relatives. They were strangers with the same name; but he knew that committal had at last presented itself. She had not come all this way on a whim, he was sure of that. Nor because she had a yen for Francisco Ruiz, he was equally sure of that. Something was troubling her and for some reason she had reached out to him. And he, the missionary, the helper, suddenly was wary.

‘Would you rather I hadn’t come?’ It was as if she had read his thoughts: she had her own wariness.

He was glad of the dark glasses, the one great advance in deception since man had first learned to lie; he knew his eyes were often too candid for his own good. ‘No. No, I’m glad to see you. But it’s a long way – I—’

‘You don’t understand why I bothered?’ She sat back, put an arm along the back of the bench, slowly drummed her fingers. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? We should be able to talk to each other more easily than this. I’m twenty-four and you’re – what? – thirty? – and I don’t suppose we’ve ever had more than an hour’s serious conversation together in all that time.’

‘Whose fault do you think it was?’ He didn’t mean it as an aggressive question, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘I don’t know. I sometimes wonder if it was Mother’s.’ She raised her head and even behind her dark glasses he was aware of her careful gaze.

‘How was she when you called her?’ He avoided the silent question she had put to him.

‘Hysterical, when I said I was coming down to see you. Hysterically glad, I mean. Jealous, too, I think,’ she added, and looked away from him, not even trusting to the dark glasses.

He stared down at the ground at their shadows, razor-edged and dead as paper silhouettes. Shadows at this altitude were always much more clear-cut than at less rarefied heights; the mental processes were also said to be sharper: but only keener in being aware of problems, not in solving them. He had solved nothing in the nine months he had been here and he knew he could not solve this new problem of himself and Carmel. But he was now acutely conscious of it as he had never been before. He realized for the first time that she was jealous of him.

‘There’s nothing to stop her coming down here,’ he said, dodging the real issue for the moment.