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.

‘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.

‘Do you want her to?’

‘No-o.’ It was the first time he had ever admitted it, even to himself.

Was he mistaken or did something like delight flick across her face? ‘She said you’d never asked her down here. When I told her I was coming down to surprise you, she said it was only correct for a lady to wait till she was asked. God, she’s like something out of Henry James!’

He nodded, smiling, and impulsively she put her hand on his. He had not liked her when they had been in the house with the Ruiz family, had been annoyed by her brashness and a quality of hardness that had looked as if it could never be cracked. But now she was softer, even vulnerable, and suddenly he felt a warmth of feeling that he recognized as love, something he had not felt for any of the family in years. He squeezed her fingers.

‘We should feel sorry for her—’

‘I do, Terry. Really. I couldn’t hate her, though God knows—’ She took off her dark glasses as if she wanted him to see the truth of what she was about to say. ‘She made me hate you. I was so damned jealous of you—’

‘I never knew,’ he said. ‘Not till just now.’

She squeezed his hand again, as if making up for lost time in a display of affection. ‘I think you have some of Dad’s sensitivity in you. He was a selfish, randy old fool, running after those girls the way he did – in a way, I suppose, he was a real sonofabitch, leaving us like that – but he had his moments, sometimes he knew exactly what I was trying to say even though I couldn’t open my mouth—’ She put her glasses back on, stared at the darkness of the past. ‘It was a pity he wasn’t always like that. He might have saved Mother from herself. And saved us from her.’

A tall hedge lined one side of the patio, separating it from a large garden. Through the hedge he could see an Indian gardener lazily turning over the yellow soil among some shrubs; some buds on rose bushes promised the coming of summer. The gardener wore a tribal headband that strapped something to his ear; it was a moment or two before McKenna recognized that the small package was a transistor radio. The gardener moved zombie-like through the motions of his work, his face stiff and blank; whatever he was listening to on the radio, talk or music or a description of a football game, seemed to have no effect on him; the radio could have been no more than an uncomfortable earmuff. To McKenna it seemed to typify the Indians: they were of the world but they were deaf to it. Just as the McKennas had been deaf to each other for years.

‘Why did you come?’ he asked, sure enough of her now to put the question.

She, too, was looking through the hedge at the gardener; but he was just part of the scenery to her, someone to be captured on film by a tourist’s camera. ‘I wanted to see what you had done with your life.’

‘Not much,’ he confessed; then added defensively, ‘At least not yet.’

‘At least you’re doing something. I’ve done nothing, absolutely goddam nothing. I’m what you preach against – a parasite.’

‘If I preached against parasites around here, I’d be branded a Communist.’ He had automatically lowered his voice, glanced over his shoulder towards the house. When he looked back at her she was smiling. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘You. The one thing I remember about you was that you were never scared. Cautious, yes, but never frightened of anything. That time you were home from school on vacation and the burglars broke into the house. You locked Mother and me in her bedroom and went downstairs on your own. The guys, whoever they were, heard you coming and ran. But you went down there, that was the thing – you were my hero for a day or two.’

‘I was scared stiff,’ he said, not asking why he had remained her hero only for a day or two.

She nodded towards the house. ‘What were you then – cautious or scared?’

‘Cautious, I guess. It’s the only way to get by up here. Nobody here, neither the criollos nor the campesinos, accept you on your own terms. It’s their terms all the time or nothing.’

‘Is that why you haven’t made much of your life here so far?’ He nodded and she put her hand sympathetically on his again. Then she said, ‘That was my mistake, I think. I tried living on my own terms. I’ve only just discovered I was never really sure what they were.’

‘Then we’re alike,’ he said, and she looked pleased. ‘I’m never quite sure about people who say they’ll only live on their own terms, whether they’re conceited or selfish or just insecure. I’ve never been convinced it’s an entirely noble attitude.’

‘ “To thine own self be true” –you think Polonius was wrong?’

‘In the Church, anyway, I’ve never found him proved right.’ He stood up, smiling now to divert her from what he had just let slip; it was too soon, he did not know her well enough yet, to confess his doubts. ‘I better go see what the Bishop wants.’

She stood up beside him. ‘You’re not annoyed because I came, Terry?’

‘No. I’m glad,’ he said, and meant it. He had reached a depth of loneliness where reunion even with someone half a stranger had its comfort. ‘Will you be staying long?’

‘A week or two. Until we get to know each other again.’

‘Will you stay here?’ He nodded at the house.

‘Depends. Not if Pancho becomes too possessive.’

‘Is it serious with him?’

‘On my part, you mean?’ She shook her head. ‘He’s the latest in a long line. I haven’t been a very good girl – the nuns at Marymount must be wearing out their rosaries praying for me. I’m not exactly the right sort of sister for a priest. I think I have too much of Dad in me.’ She smiled wryly, nothing at all like the brash girl he had met an hour earlier. ‘Father, forgive me, for I have sinned—’

‘Who hasn’t?’ he said, unembarrassed.

He left the Ruiz house and drove back to the main plaza. The benches in the square were now occupied by old men dressed in old-fashioned dark suits, their wary faces hidden in the shade of broad-brimmed felt hats; they looked like retired gangsters from movies of the thirties, men who had stepped out of frame but not out of costume. But McKenna knew that they were not as interesting as old-time gangsters. They were just middle-class criollos living on dreams that were as dim as their eyesight, selling off their possessions piece by piece, hoping that at the end they would have enough left to pay for a funeral befitting their blood. A flock of young children, criollos and mestizos, wafted up the broad steps of the cathedral, two nuns fluttering behind them like Black Orpington hens. An army truck went round the plaza and pulled up outside the prison on the other side of the square. Half a dozen prisoners, all Indians, chained together, got down from the back of the truck and were pushed through the small door in the tall wooden gates. The truck drove off and that side of the square was once more quiet and deserted. No one in the square had done more than glance casually across at the prisoners. Too much interest, McKenna knew, might have brought an inquiry from the security police on the third floor of the government palace on the northern side of the plaza. He looked across and saw the man at the third floor window: the sun flashed on his binoculars as he turned them from the prison gates on to McKenna himself as the latter got out of the Jeep outside the Bishop’s palace. For one mad moment the priest wanted to turn and jerk his thumb at the watcher, but reason prevailed. You did not make rude gestures in front of the Bishop’s palace, certainly not at the security police.

As McKenna crossed the tessellated pavement a small boy flung himself at his feet; but he was not a juvenile sinner seeking absolution, just a bootblack claiming the Americano padre could not visit the Bishop with dirty shoes. McKenna submitted to the blackmail, gave the boy a lavish tip, then went into the palace spotless at least up to the ankles. Behind him the bootblack, clutching half a day’s income in his hand, told him he was a saint.

If it were only so easy, McKenna told himself.

Bishop Ruiz was in his study reading The Wall Street Journal; he nodded at it as he put it down. ‘There are so many Bibles to get through these days. Do you read it, Padre McKenna?’

‘No, your grace. I am stupid when it comes to understanding high finance.’

‘Your father never taught you anything about it? He was a rich man.’

‘My father used to say that a fool and his father’s money are soon parted, so he never gave me any. Not till he died.’

‘I knew him when he owned the San Cristobal mine. I was a young priest then – I baptized you, did you know that?’

‘No,’ said McKenna, and wondered if he was expected to feel honoured. He also wondered how much the Bishop, a wealthy man even as a priest, had charged for the service.

‘I used to go out and say Mass for the miners. Your father would count the heads at Mass and then give me an American dollar for each one – he always seemed to have a bank of dollars. He would joke that he was buying his way into Heaven on the bended knees of the Indians.’

‘What did the Indians think of him?’ McKenna had never known the Bishop to talk of his father before and he wondered if this was the reason he had been brought here. The Bishop had chosen to speak in Spanish and that meant this was more than just a social call. McKenna was puzzled, seeking a connection between himself and his father that would concern the Bishop, but he could think of none. Even the older Indians up on the altiplano, ones such as Jesu Mamani, had never asked McKenna about his father.

Bishop Ruiz hesitated, then said, ‘I do not know, to be truthful. I have never known the miners to love any of the mine owners.’

They didn’t love my father, McKenna thought. You know the truth about him but you can’t condemn him because that would mean condemning your own kind.

‘When your father sold out to that other company, they worked the mine out in five years, drove the miners like dogs, then closed it down and went home. They left a caretaker-manager and his wife there, Americans. When the revolution came in 1952, the miners went back there and killed them – horribly. I saw the bodies—’ He shook his head, worked his mouth at an old vile taste, shuddered because he knew the future might one day taste the same. ‘The miners all went to communion the next morning and the priest up in Altea, poor Padre Luis, was too frightened to turn them away from the altar rail. He was afraid they would have killed him, too, if he had refused them.’ He looked across his wide, leather-topped desk at McKenna. ‘Those are the sort of people you are dealing with, my son.’

Now he’s getting to the reason for my being here, McKenna thought. But he was still puzzled: ‘I don’t think they connect me with the mine. What that other company did, I mean. As for what my father did—’ He tailed off, not wanting to condemn his father to this man who would give absolution too easily, because his own money came from the same sort of exploitation.

‘I did not say they did,’ said Bishop Ruiz patiently. In the cathedral next door the bells tolled for the midday Angelus. One of the bells was cracked and it sounded what could have been a blasphemous note; but the bells had been rung for four hundred years and tradition won out over music. The Bishop listened to it, flinching a little, then put it out of his mind; he would leave the question of a new bell to his successor, just as his predecessor had left it to him. He looked across at the young priest who was a more immediate problem. ‘Padre McKenna, did you read the Pope’s encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae?’

‘Of course,’ said McKenna, and knew now why he had been sent for.

‘It has come to our ears—’ Bishop Ruiz sat up straight. That’s it, thought McKenna, never lounge when using the royal or episcopal plural; the day, only half over, had been full of shock and now he was beginning to feel hysterically facetious. ‘It has come to our ears that you have been giving the Pill to some of the women up in Altea.’

‘Where did you hear that, your grace?’

‘We have our sources,’ said the Bishop; and McKenna had a vision of the fat little priest Padre Luis sitting exactly where he himself was sitting now. Padre Luis didn’t have the courage to condemn murder but he could condemn a priest who went against the Holy Father’s orders. ‘We are assured they are reliable. Are the reports true?’

McKenna sighed inwardly, then nodded. ‘Yes, your grace.’

‘Does the Superior of your order condone this?’

‘He doesn’t know. I bought the supply of the Pill out of my own funds, had them mailed down to me from the States.’

‘Addressed to you as a priest?’ The Bishop’s voice, which had become formal once he had got down to business, suddenly broke. The bells next door abruptly subsided, the cracked bell clanging out the last note sardonically.

‘No. They were addressed to Senor T. J. McKenna, care of general delivery at the post office here in San Sebastian. I did my best to be discreet, your grace.’

Bishop Ruiz had a sense of humour; he permitted himself a smile at the young rebel. ‘That seems to be where your discretion stopped, at the post office. Padre, do you realize the magnitude of what you have done? It is one thing to sit in the confessional and condone what married couples tell you they have done. But you have—’ He threw up his elegant hands. ‘You are doing far worse than question the Holy Father’s dictum, you are actually sinning against it actively. As much – as much as if you were bedding with these women yourself!’

McKenna had expected a more sophisticated reprimand than that. ‘The thought couldn’t have been farther from my mind. I mean about going to bed with these women.’

‘Don’t joke,’ said the Bishop sharply, realizing he was not dealing with a stupid village priest like Padre Luis. I keep forgetting, he thought, this young man comes from the same class as myself. Well, almost: the blood may be coarser, but he has as much education and money.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound facetious—’

‘Did the women come to you and ask your help in this way?’

‘Well, not exactly—’ McKenna hesitated, knowing even now that nothing he might say was going to win justification for what he had done.

‘What does that mean?’

‘One woman talked to me in the confessional. She has had twelve children in sixteen years – only four of them have survived.’

‘That was God’s will,’ said the Bishop, tasting the brass of an old platitude.

‘Forgive me for saying so, your grace, but I was the woman’s confessor. As far as I could tell, she had done nothing to warrant God’s punishment like that.’

‘Are you questioning God’s will?’

McKenna took a deep breath. ‘I guess I’m questioning the Church’s interpretation of God’s will. I can’t bring myself to believe that He meant these people to live like they have to, that poverty and the annual grief at the loss of a child are necessary for a state of grace. Forgive me again, but the Church in this country has done little, if anything, to alleviate the poverty of the Indians. I don’t know what the full answer to the problem is, but after listening to that woman I knew I had to do something. And cutting down the number of mouths to feed seemed to me at least a start towards defeating poverty. I didn’t hand out the Pill indiscriminately – I warned the women about possible side effects, but they were willing to take the risk. Women, even simple peasant women, get tired of being continually pregnant. Men, especially priests, too often forget that. The Church isn’t just Rome, your grace – I’m part of it, too. I didn’t do this hurriedly or without a great deal of soul-searching—’

‘Do you think the Holy Father did not search his soul before he made his decision? You should not question his wisdom. A son does not tell his father what to do.’

McKenna heard the echo of Agostino’s remark earlier this morning. Oh God, he thought admiringly, how You weave Your web up there in Heaven. It had been Agostino’s mother, Maria Mamani, who had told him in the confessional that she wanted no more children.

‘Do you still have a supply of the contraceptive?’

‘Yes.’ He had ordered enough to supply every woman in Altea for a year; so far only Maria and three other women had come to him. He could imagine the snickering that had gone on in the mail order warehouse in Chicago when his order had arrived; some randy guy down there in Bolivia, Senor T. J. McKenna, was having a ball with a tribe of Indians or something. Storing the pills had become a problem in itself; one box of them had already been eaten by rats. At least he might have achieved something there, cut down on the rodent birth rate. ‘Quite a lot of it.’

‘You will dispose of it – immediately. I shall write your Superior and inform him of what you have done. I shall leave him to punish you or order your penance. In the meantime I shall put you on probation for six months. If you are intransigent again, Pacue McKenna, I shall order your removal from my diocese.’

He called me intransigent, not sinful, McKenna noted. Did that mean the Bishop had his own doubts? ‘Yes, your grace.’

‘My son,’ Bishop Ruiz’s tone softened again, shed formality as he might shed a chasuble, ‘you cannot change things overnight. Not on this continent. You and Senor Taber come down here, full of good intentions, no one doubts your sincerity, but – but you look at us from the outside. We are another world. We shall come into your world in time, it is inevitable, but you must give us time. We understand the campesinos better than you. Do you not think that I, as a man of God, want their lives improved? But you have to be patient, my son. Che Guevara came here with good intentions, though misguided ones, but even he did not understand the campesinos. And he was a South American, an Argentinian, not a North American like you. Reform will come, but you must allow us to make our own pace.’

McKenna wanted to ask who had put the brakes on since the reforms of 1952, but he knew the interview was over. ‘Yes, your grace.’

Bishop Ruiz rose, came round his desk and held out his hand. McKenna hesitated. The ring glinted on the finger, an invitation to bow to authority: should I ignore it? Then discretion overcame bravado: I’m on probation right now. He bent and kissed the ring.

‘God be with you, my son.’ Then the Bishop looked him up and down. ‘You look very smart today. You wouldn’t be out of place in some rich parish in the United States.’

‘I think I would be,’ said McKenna, and after a moment the Bishop smiled and nodded in agreement.

McKenna went out of the room and Bishop Ruiz returned to his chair. He picked up The Wall Street Journal, but he was reading a foreign language, one that suddenly, if only temporarily, he did not feel comfortable with. He dropped the newspaper back on the desk and sat staring across the room. He reached across, took a cigar from a tooled leather box, lit it and sat back again. His purple biretta rested on one corner of the desk and he picked it up and examined it as a mining engineer might examine a piece of quartz. Is that what I have spent my life working for?

Or had he worked for it? The second son of the Ruiz had always been meant for the Church. It had been that way for generations; one or two second sons had rebelled, but the family had fixed that: they had been banished and the third sons had taken their places. The succession had been as ordained as that in a royal family: the eldest son to run the estates, the second son to enter the Church, the other sons to stand by in case of replacement: just like a royal family or a football team, the Bishop mused. It had not been a difficult life in the priesthood; no Ruiz could be expected to take vows of poverty so none was ever expected to join an ascetic order unless he wished to. Sometimes the Bishop, a naturally sensual man, had regretted the absence of women in his life; but then he consoled himself that, had he been permitted a wife, he might have made a bad choice. All the prayers in the world could not guarantee a good wife; woman was God’s best joke on man. He saw that every time he went to his brother’s house. Alejandro, who thought of himself as a king, was mocked by his queen; Romola was her husband’s purgatory here on earth and she enjoyed every minute of her punishment of him. The Lord had at least protected the Bishop from someone like her.

He swung his chair round, looked out the window. The young American priest was just getting into his Jeep; a young bootblack rushed at him, but McKenna brusquely waved him away. The young man was angry. And I am responsible, thought the Bishop. But what else could I do? The world, our world, does need changing; who knows that better than I? Some day the campesinos will rise up and cut all our throats, even mine or anyway that of one of my successors; the purple biretta won’t be a protection, only a target. We shall be killed because we are Ruiz; if not Alejandro and I, then Francisco and his brother Jorge now in the seminary up at La Paz. Time is running out for us.

Cigar ash fell on his soutane and he fastidiously brushed it off. He swung his chair round and looked back into the room. It was a room that suggested luxury, one that would not have been out of place in the Ruiz family mansion; he never made the mistake of receiving any of the campesinos or any of the Leftist government officials here. But it typified him, he knew: he was a lover of the good life, of privilege and the past: he was a Ruiz. And that is why, even though I think he may have the right approach, I cannot condone what McKenna has done. It is too late: I am too soft, corrupt, if you like, to join the protestors; old men do not make good revolutionaries. I am not old in years, it is true; but like Alejandro I am old in my ways, trapped by history. All I can do is pray that God forgives the reactionaries of the world.

There was a knock on his door and his secretary, a small, thin mestizo priest, older than himself, came in. ‘Senor Obermaier is here to see you, your grace.’

The ex-Nazi: now there was a real reactionary, one through conviction, not through laziness. The Bishop sat up, feeling a little less condemned. He put out his cigar, straightened his soutane. Though he did not like Karl Obermaier, he was easy to talk to: he was another man who lived in the past.

‘Show Senor Obermaier in. And bring us some wine. The Niersteiner would be appropriate, I think.’

Chapter Two
1

The driver pulled up the Land-Rover outside the railway station and Taber and Pereira got out. A blind Indian woman, led by a small girl, came shuffling towards them; the child guided the claw of a hand up to the coin that Pereira dropped into it. A policeman, dark eyes blank under the stiff vertical peak of his cap that seemed to be an extension of the planes of his face, stood by the kerb but made no attempt to move the beggar woman on. He was an Indian, too: criollos and gringos were fair game.

‘Begging is against the law,’ said Pereira as he and Taber went on into the big deserted hall of the station. ‘But no one ever takes any notice of it, least of all the minions of the law.’

Miguel Pereira was a chubby little man in his mid-thirties with a handlebar moustache, bad breath that he constantly sweetened with mints, and a vocabulary derived from a library of Victorian English novels. He had graduated as an agronomist from the University of San Marcos in Lima, then had had an extra year at Texas A & M on an American grant. He had come back to San Sebastian, married a local girl and now had four children and two jobs. He was the government agricultural adviser and, under a pseudonym that everyone knew of, he also managed the largest cinema in town.

‘It is the only way one can survive,’ he had told Taber when the latter had arrived a week ago. ‘The government does not reward its devoted minions. I grew up as a child expecting a life of comfort – my family were of wealthy means. But we lost all that in the revolution – we were not as fortunate as some people. I was suddenly thrown on the world—’ He had spread dramatic hands; Taber listened for violins, but heard none. ‘When one is born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth, one finds it difficult to adapt to a life of penury. Luxury is in the blood, don’t you think?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ said Taber mildly. ‘It’s quite a while since I’ve had a blood test.’

‘A sense of humour!’ Pereira clapped his hands together as if Taber had just announced a World Bank grant for penurious agronomists. ‘The sign of an educated man. We are going to be very amicable colleagues, Senor Taber. You will be my guest any night you wish at the cinema. Tonight, perhaps? We are showing Rosemary’s Baby, a jolly comedy about witchcraft in New York. The campesinos will love it, though they may find it a little unsophisticated.’

‘Some other time. I like Westerns.’

‘Who doesn’t?’ Pereira put his hands on his plump hips as if he were about to draw six-guns. ‘John Wayne. The campesinos flock to see his movies. They are waiting for the one where he is shot in the back by an Indian or a Mexican bandit. I await with dread the night it happens. They will burn down the cinema in celebration.’

Now, in the station, he said, ‘This way to the Customs chief. His name is Suarez – he is a very difficult man.’

‘They always are,’ said Taber, with memories of other Customs chiefs in a dozen other countries. ‘It’s in their blood.’

‘A sense of humour!’ Pereira burbled admiringly. ‘How it makes life bearable!’

Their footsteps echoing hollowly on the stone floor, they walked across the wide main hall. Only four trains a week now arrived at and departed from San Sebastian; the station was a monument from and to the past; it had been superseded by the still half-constructed airport terminal up on the altiplano. Birds flew in and out through the upper reaches of the high domed roof, the only arrivals and departures for today. From the hall Taber could see the empty platforms stretching away down towards the marshalling yards, currents of rust showing clearly in the river of rails. In the yards two ancient engines, British made at the turn of the century, shunted some equally ancient wagons back and forth as if the drivers were intent only on keeping the stock rolling, otherwise they would be out of a job. I’m in another museum, Taber thought.

Suarez’s office was like that of the director of a museum. Yellowed sheets of regulations hung on the wall like ancient scrolls; a Wanted smuggler stared out from a poster like a cave dweller. Suarez himself was a dapper mestizo with one eye that was walled and the other suspicious. He nodded without smiling and waited for Taber to make the opening remark. All right, you bastard, Taber thought, no pleasantries.

‘An FAO officer was here on a short visit three months ago. He recommended that sulphur, fertilizer and some other soil additives should be used around here. He ordered it and it was dispatched at once. Senor Pereira understands the shipment has now arrived.’

Suarez nodded, a barely perceptible movement. ‘Yes.’

‘Then we’d like to take delivery of it.’

‘That is impossible. The necessary papers have not arrived.’ He spoke Spanish with the correctness of someone who had had to learn it; Quechua had been his childhood language. These are the worst, Taber thought. The converts to a way of life were as dedicated as the converts to a religion.

‘I have the papers here with me. Duplicates.’

‘I must have the originals. They have not arrived.’

‘Where are they?’

Suarez shrugged, his good eye as blank as the other.

‘How long will they be arriving?’

Another shrug. Out in the yards the engines hooted: derisively, thought Taber, trying to hold on to his temper.

‘The chemicals are urgently necessary. The farmers need them.’

A third shrug. ‘The papers are also necessary.’

Taber looked around the office, wondering if it was worthwhile wrecking. But the steel cabinet, the plain table and chairs, the old rusty typewriter, were government issue: Suarez would probably be glad to have them replaced. Taber looked down at the dapper little man and wondered what the penalty would be for wrecking a corrupt Customs chief. Death, probably: the system had to be protected.

‘I shall write to La Paz at once and ask them to send the papers special delivery.’

Suarez shrugged yet again. ‘It will be no use hurrying them. They are notoriously slow and inefficient up in La Paz.’

‘Shall I quote you?’

For a moment the good eye flickered; then there was a fifth shrug. ‘As you wish.’

One more shrug, you little bastard, and I’ll risk the firing squad. ‘I shall write today. Adios.’

Outside in the main hall again Pereira, hurrying to keep up with Taber’s long strides, said, ‘It’s his way of surviving. Why didn’t you pay him the bribe he wanted?’

‘One more remark like that and I’ll wreck you.’ Taber stopped, looked about him, blind with rage. ‘I’ll bloody wreck someone!’

Pereira backed away, hands held up in front of him; all his gestures seemed borrowed from old silent movies. ‘A man of principle! So inspiring to see—’

Suddenly Taber’s rage went, he took off his cap, scratched his head and laughed. ‘Miguel, you’re a beaut. When did you last take out a principle and look at it?’

Pereira was offended. He said nothing till they were back at the Land-Rover. ‘It is not easy to be a man of principle all the time, not when one has to survive—’

Taber felt sorry for the chubby little man; after all, his own survival was guaranteed. ‘Miguel, I’m no paragon. I’ve bent my principles so often I could have strung them together and made a hippie necklace out of them. But I like to tell myself that when I’ve bent them, no one else has suffered – at least not as far as I know. But that bastard inside there—!’ He looked back into the station, his temper rising again. ‘I’m here to help you people and I’m buggered if I’m going to pay through the nose for the privilege!’

‘You would not have to pay, Harry, not personally. Suarez will not want much, a few dollars, that’s all, a token payment—’

‘It’s just the principle of the thing with him, that what you mean?’

‘Yes,’ said Pereira eagerly; then realized he had been trapped.

Plaintively he said, ‘Harry, it has been the system for centuries. The Spanish officials started it as soon as they arrived here after Pizarro. It is a way of life. Do not the English treat the Welfare State as a way of life?’

‘Go on,’ said Taber, avoiding a touchy point.

‘Suarez is not a rich man, he has a wife and five children to support. Is not FAO’s annual budget ten to fifteen million dollars a year? A few dollars – will they be missed from petty cash?’

‘They will be by me,’ said Taber emphatically, made even sorer by the reference to the Welfare State; he was glad his father and mother had died before they had seen their ideal abused. ‘Look, Miguel, I’ve paid bribes before. But now I’m growing tired of it. If it were just to get something of my own, something personal, I might slip Suarez a few bob. But this is not for me, it’s for the campesinos you and I are supposed to be helping—’

‘Oh, I appreciate the horns of your dilemma, Harry! Oh, indeed I do. One side of me has nothing but disgust for my compatriot Suarez. But the other side—’ He shrugged; and Taber almost hit him. ‘I am a practical man, Harry. It is the only way to survive.’

‘Then we’re going to be impractical and take the risk of survival. At least as far as Suarez is concerned.’

‘The sulphur and the rest of it will stay in his sheds till he expires. Then we shall only have his successor to deal with. He will be exactly the same, Harry. A Customs man who did not take bribes would never be promoted, not in this province. It would destroy the system. So how do you propose to have the shipment cleared?’

‘I’ll think of something,’ said Taber doggedly, and succeeded in hiding his hopelessness. He had been battling graft for years, never winning even a skirmish with a corrupt official; there had been places, East Africa for instance, where there had been honest officials eager to help rather than to hinder; but he had heard with despair that the system had begun to creep in even there. He had once met an official in Brazil who boasted of his ‘honest corruption’, who set a price according to the income of the man seeking the favour and never went above it. But now Taber had reached the end of his patience. Not just with corruption, but with bureaucracy, obstruction, betrayal, even with FAO itself. He had once been a dedicated team man, but he had become a loner because the team had let him down. Bribery was part of the subscription fee as a member of the team and he was no longer going to subscribe. ‘I’ll think of something.’

He left Pereira to return to the office in the Land-Rover with the driver. Though he did not dislike the little man, he had had enough of him for the moment; Pereira could not stop talking and he would only continue the argument throughout the day that one should compromise, should accept the realities of a way of life. Taber knew the Bolivian was right, that he should not attempt to bring in here the standards of an outsider. But that did not mean he had to suffer a lecture all day long. He excused himself, saying he had to buy some personal necessities, and quickly left Pereira before the latter could protest he would accompany him. He crossed the road, narrowly avoiding being hit by a truck whose driver, one of an international breed, held to the principle that pedestrians were an expendable nuisance. He made it safely to the opposite side and dived into the crowd of Indians drifting through the big market opposite the station.

Taber always enjoyed markets anywhere in the world. It was an exposure of people’s lives; they revealed not only their wants but their character. Smithfield and Covent Garden and market day in any county town revealed more of the English character than any Gallup poll; and he believed it was the same all over the world. The bright fruits, the coloured rubble of vegetables, the rugs, the copper utensils, were only the surface kaleidoscope; the faces of the sellers and buyers were the real essence. Here even the Indians opened up their expressions, shucked off their masks and revealed the living people behind them.

He wandered through the alleys between the stalls, looking at the jumble of goods displayed. Battered pots and pans, brass ornaments that promised luck, bundles of candles, cane quena flutes, tiny guitar-like kirkinchos, sandals cut from old tyres. bowler hats, wood carvings of the Christ, the Virgin and the Sun God, take your pick, faded magazines from which Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor smiled their empty international smiles: there was something for everyone, if everyone had money. A woman, small bowler hat sitting high on the pumpkin of her head, stopped by a stall and held out a string bag full of potatoes. The stall-owner shook his head, but the woman persisted. The man hesitated, then picked up two candles, gave them to the woman and took the potatoes. The woman went away, heading for the small church that stood on the other side of the plaza at the far end of the market. The candles would be lit and offered up for God knew what reason. The stall-owner looked at Taber, then held up the bag of potatoes. Taber smiled, shook his head and moved on. He had as little use for potatoes as he had for votive candles.

He stopped in front of a woman selling coca leaves. She sat huddled under a poncho; a baby hung in a shawl from her back like a growth. She looked up when Taber’s shadow fell across her, then looked away at once: gringos did not buy the coca leaf. A boy of about twelve, barefooted and ragged, crept along the wall of the store outside which the woman sat; he stopped by her, then held out a grimy hand in which lay some coins. The woman looked at him, then scooped some of the pale green leaves into a horn of paper, dropped some grey lime into another horn and handed them to him. The boy at once dropped down on his haunches against the wall, took some of the leaves and began to chew them.

‘What’s he doing?’

Carmel McKenna had stepped out from between two stalls. She was dressed in slacks and a suède jacket and had a pair of sunglasses pushed back on her head like a glass tiara.

‘Watch him.’

The boy took the small wet ball of leaves from his mouth, added some of the powdered lime, then popped the ball back into his mouth. He sat back against the wall, turned his face up to the sun, closed his eyes and began to chew.

‘It’s cocaine, only here they chew it instead of sniffing it. He puts the lime in it as an alkaline, to bring out the taste.’ As they watched, the boy, still with his eyes closed, tilted his head to one side and spat. ‘He’s an expert.’

‘What sort of expert?’

‘The trick is to spit out the saliva without burning your lips from the lime. He’s got it down to a fine art.’

‘But he only looks about ten or twelve!’

‘They start up here at about seven. They don’t do it for kicks. They do it as an escape from the bloody misery of their existence.’

He did not condone the habit of coca chewing, but he was abruptly angry with her. Damned outsiders.… Then he remembered the outsider’s standards he had tried to introduce over at the station. He smiled, his stern bony face suddenly made attractive. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why?’

‘I was angry with you.’

‘I wouldn’t have known. You look pretty sour all the time. You’d have a ghastly temper, wouldn’t you?’ He had noticed that she had all the adjectives they seemed to teach at expensive schools: ghastly was a class badge. But even as he thought it he smiled inwardly at himself: he still had a county grammar school mentality. They began to walk slowly up between the stalls, the Indians watching them with wary curiosity. ‘Why were you angry with me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he lied.

‘You’re a very difficult man, Mr Taber,’ she said, then let him off her hook. ‘Tell me more about why young kids like that boy take to cocaine so young.’

‘Well, for one thing, by chewing it they can go for days without food. That boy probably doesn’t know what a square meal looks like.’

‘He had enough money to pay for the leaves and the lime.’

‘A few cents. That’ll keep him going for two or three days. If he’d bought food with it, he’d have got enough for two or three mouthfuls.’

‘Do they become addicted to the drug?’

‘What do you think?’ he said, his voice irritable again. Christ, these outsiders lived in a cocoon; and this time he did not include himself with her as an outsider. ‘Look.’

A youth of about twenty lay sprawled against a wall. Taber took Carmel’s arm and moved her closer. The Indian’s mouth gaped open, exposing green stumps of teeth against whitish gums.

Black stains ran down from the corners of his mouth where the saliva had dribbled. His skin was yellow and there were deep purple rings round his eyes. Though he was unconscious, indeed looked dead, his pale lips occasionally quivered, like a silent appeal for help.

‘He’s a goner,’ said Taber. ‘He’ll be dead in twelve months at the outside.’

‘You don’t sound very upset,’ said Carmel, turning away, feeling suddenly cold: it was as if for the first time she had seen the skull of a living man, smelt the turned earth of his waiting grave.

‘I’ve spent twelve years among people who die every day from malnutrition. I’m still upset by it, but I have to keep it to myself. That chap won’t die from drug addiction, that’ll only be the means. He’ll die because he’s never had enough to eat, because he was born to a miserable bloody existence that no human being, in today’s world, should have to endure!’

‘You’re angry again,’ she said. ‘But this time I understand.’

‘I should hope to Christ you would,’ he said and did not apologize. ‘If you don’t, after seeing that, there’s no bloody hope for him and his people. Or for you.’

They had come out of the market into a plaza. They walked beneath a colonnade above which hung farolas, the closed-in, carved wooden balconies from old Spain. Hidalgos of past centuries had walked here, secure in their own present, careless of the future; now their descendants, old men in stiff white collars and stiff black suits, walked with the same dignity but not the same confidence. The stores along the colonnade that once had only wooden shutters now had plate-glass windows; none of the stores had any customers, as if all stocks had been sold and the store-owners had not thought it worth while reordering. Then Taber and Carmel passed a café crowded with criollo boys and girls of high school age; the place bulged with the high spirits that passed for optimism. Above the door was a carved profile of St Sebastian, chipped and smoothed by age: the patron saint of the town looked worn and dejected. Beneath the carving was an enamel sign advertising a soft drink.

‘Inca Cola?’ Carmel’s eyebrows went up in amusement.

‘The Incas never discovered the wheel, but they used clocks, guano fertilizer, they built aqueducts and bridges, they knew all about agricultural terracing and they knew how to make metal alloys. Why shouldn’t they have invented Coca-Cola?’

‘You’re putting me on. Inca Cola.’ She shook her head and they walked on. ‘I’ll bet there’s some American influence there.’ He said nothing, and she looked up at him. ‘Are you anti-American, Mr Taber?’

‘I’m not anti-anyone till people make fools of themselves.’

‘Have we made fools of ourselves down here?’

‘Sometimes. You still have to make your biggest mistake.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Turning your back on South America because it won’t develop the way Washington thinks it should. Anti-Communist, capitalistic and with preference for only American investment.’

‘Do you think we will turn our back on it?’

‘I hope not. There are some people in Washington who are at last beginning to realize that nationalism and Communism are not the same thing. There are a lot of nationalists on this continent, in this country, who have no more love for Communism than they have for your country. But unless they sing God Bless America and let American investment come in here with no strings attached, Washington wants nothing to do with them.’

‘Don’t you think our State Department knows what to do?’

‘Forgive the vulgarity, Miss McKenna, but your State Department, when it comes to South America, always reminds me of The Perfumed Garden. It has twenty-five positions on any given situation.’

She laughed so heartily that two of the passing old men turned back to look at her. ‘I don’t think that’s vulgar.’

‘I didn’t think you would. But I apologized, just in case.’

She stopped laughing. ‘Why did you think I wouldn’t think it was vulgar?’

‘Listening to you the other day. You were flat out trying to prove how broadminded you were.’

‘You’re vulgarly rude, you know that?’ She looked at him sideways, studying him hard for the first time; then she looked ahead again and nodded. ‘I was trying too hard. I always do that among strangers. You may not believe it, Mr Taber, but I’m basically a shy girl. The shy ones are always the ones who try too hard.’

They passed out of the shade of the colonnade, feeling the warmth of the sun as soon as they emerged, crossed the road and were moving into the small garden square in the centre of the plaza when they heard the shots.

Taber at once put his arm about Carmel, pulling her to him and looking wildly around. The shots had been close, too close for comfort. The small pack of bootblacks at the intersection of the paths through the square suddenly scattered, diving into the shrubs like so many shrieking birds; a flock of birds exploded out of the bushes, whistling frantically, and swept away out of sight. Half a dozen women who had been sitting on the ground at the foot of the statue of Simon Bolivar in the centre of the square flung themselves flat, their faces pressed into the mosaic tiles of the path. A small child came running towards the group and its mother screamed at it to get down; the child fell down, skidding along on its face, and for one awful moment Taber thought it had been hit. Then as he pushed Carmel down on to the path he saw the child crawl forward and disappear into the spreadeagled cluster of women as into a pile of dark rocks. A bullet smacked into a seat right beside Taber and Carmel, hit the ironwork and went ricocheting off with that whine that was both frightening and fascinating, Another bullet chipped a piece off the Great Liberator; Taber, looking up, saw that the statue was pockmarked with bullet holes. There were more shots, several yells, then suddenly there was a dull boom.

Taber raised his head and looked across the square. People were lying flat everywhere, even the old men in their stiff black suits: dignity was no protection against indiscriminate bullets. Smoke was flowering out of the doors and windows of the bank on the corner of the plaza; a man staggered out of the front door, his hands to his face, and collapsed in a sitting position on the pavement. Two cars, engines roaring, were pulling away from in front of the bank. Suddenly one of them stalled, but the other, tyres screeching, swung round the square, heading for the main street that ran out of town. Three men fell out of the stalled car and came running across the square; the second car had shuddered to a stop and was waiting for them. One of the Indian women at the foot of the statue sat up, her back to the advancing bank robbers. One of the men ran right into her, plunging over her and falling headlong. His pistol shot out of his hand, slid across the tiled path towards Taber like a challenge. He moved his head up and the gun slid in under him, clunking against his breastbone.

The bank robber, a thickset man in a black hood, scrambled to his feet and hurled himself at Taber. The latter rolled aside, away from Carmel, automatically snatching at the gun as he did so. The man aimed a kick at Taber’s head but missed as the Englishman continued rolling. Taber came up on one knee, the pistol raised; then he froze, the gun a heavy weight in the hand that could barely hold it. The other two bank robbers, both hooded, stood over him, their guns aimed directly at his head. He drew a deep breath, then tossed the gun at the feet of its owner. The man picked it up, growled something that was muffled by the hood; then the three men, in answer to the urgent hooting of the horn of the car waiting for them, went running across the square. As they ran one of the men snatched some leaflets from his pocket and hurled them into the air. A gust of wind caught the leaflets and some of them were still floating across the gardens as the running men jumped into the car and it went roaring off out of the plaza.

Taber stood up, crossed quickly to Carmel and helped her to her feet. She was struggling to get her breath, her pale face turning slightly blue. Taber pushed her down on to the nearby seat, took a tablet from a tin in his pocket and forced it between her lips. ‘Take this, it’ll slow down your pulse. I’ll try and get you some oxygen. There’s a hotel over there – they’d have a cylinder—’

She clutched his arm, shook her head. ‘Don’t – leave – me!’

He looked around. The old men were getting painfully and awkwardly to their feet, dusting themselves off and looking bewilderedly around as if searching for lost dignity: the Indian women were moving in a tight group across to join the growing crowd outside the bank. Three policemen, each blowing his whistle in a loud cheep of authority, came running from different directions; a truck, horn blowing, came lurching round the plaza, pulled up in front of the bank and disgorged a dozen soldiers. People were appearing from everywhere, but now, with the arrival of the soldiers, the small crowd outside the bank began to disintegrate. The group of Indian women suddenly about-turned and trotted back to sit once more at the foot of the statue of the Liberator. The old men stood in their own group across at the bank; an image sprang into Taber’s mind of photos he had seen of delegates to international conferences in the thirties, formally dressed old men with tight worried faces who saw the coming of the end of their world. The high school students had come out of the café, chattering among themselves but, unlike teenagers Taber had seen elsewhere, minding their own business and making no attempt to move down towards the bank. People, criollos and Indians, lined the edges of the plaza or stayed stiffly where they were in the gardens; but no one made a move towards the bank now that the soldiers had arrived. The clerk who had staggered out of the bank still sat on the pavement, swaying back and forth, holding his face; against the wall of the bank Taber saw for the first time the crumpled body of a policeman. A car, siren wailing, came into the plaza and juddered to a sharp stop behind the military truck. Three officers got out and hurried into the bank.

Taber helped Carmel to her feet, putting his arm round her. Something blew against his feet; it was one of the leaflets tossed away by the bank robbers. He picked it up, held it crushed in his hand as he began to help the still gasping Carmel across the square.

‘My hotel’s not far from here. They’ll have an oxygen cylinder.’

They walked slowly, she leaning on him like an old woman. People watched them curiously, but no one stepped forward to ask if they could help. Carmel was still fighting for her breath, but Taber, his arm round her, could feel the gasping slowly subsiding.

It was perhaps three hundred yards to Taber’s hotel but it took them almost ten minutes to reach it. It was a ten-year-old concrete building that looked uncomfortably out of place among its old stone, tile-roofed neighbours; even its name, the Dorchester, was a brash piece of bravado that had not quite come off: the two middle letters of the neon sign did not work. It was owned and run by a Bulgarian and his wife and was, Pereira had assured Taber, absolutely the best hostelry in town.

Taber helped Carmel up the steps into the small lobby, sat her down on one of the bright yellow plastic-upholstered couches against the bright blue wall. The owner, a stout bald-headed man with gold-rimmed glasses and an air of being constantly harassed, came across from behind the desk with a small cylinder of oxygen.

‘The altitude, senor? Or excitement – I heard the shots—?’

‘Both,’ said Taber, watching to see that Carmel did not gulp in too much of the oxygen. He took the face-piece away from her and handed the cylinder back to the owner. ‘That’s enough. The senorita will be all right now. Will you get me a taxi?’

The hotel owner turned to call the Indian boy out from behind the desk, but stopped as the front door swung open and a police officer came in. The officer walked straight up to Taber and held out his hand.

‘The leaflet, senor.’ He was a short, thin-faced mestizo in his late forties, a man drugged by addiction to authority; he quivered now as if he were high on it, his eyes wide as he glared at Taber. ‘Hand it over at once.’

Taber looked down, saw that he still held crumpled in his hand the leaflet he had picked up in the plaza. He smoothed out the paper, held it up to read it. The officer made a grab at it, but Taber jerked it away. He was aware of the tension in the lobby, of the Indian boy half-crouched behind the desk and the owner holding the oxygen cylinder in front of him like a bomb he did not want; out of the corner of his eye he saw Carmel gasping no longer but now holding her breath, and beyond her he was aware of the owner’s angular wife standing unmoving in the doorway to the office. But he was not going to allow himself to be pushed around like some misbehaving tourist by this arrogant little policeman. He was here at the invitation of the government and the police had better get the message right at the start.

He read the leaflet: Death to the Jackboot! The People’s Revolutionary Committee … There was more in the same strain; he had read it all before, in three or four other languages. This one was in Spanish and Quechua; he wondered which language would get the greater response. He screwed up the leaflet and handed it to the officer.

‘It is an offence against the law to have such literature.’

‘You flatter it calling it literature. I picked it up in the plaza. I was just helping to keep the city clean.’

The police officer evidently did not appreciate irony. ‘You gave a gun to one of the terrorists.’

‘I gave him back his own gun. If I hadn’t, his friends would have shot me.’

Carmel had stood up, put her hand on Taber’s arm. She did not understand the Spanish dialogue, but she had made her own position clear: she was backing up Taber. He felt grateful to her, suddenly warming to her, and he put his own hand on hers. They stood in front of the police officer like a couple about to be married.

‘Who reported me?’ Taber wondered which of the dozens of people in the plaza had tried to curry favour with the police; none of them would probably dare to inform on one of the locals, but there was no danger in putting the finger on an outsider.

‘It is of no concern,’ said the officer; for the first time he looked unsure of himself. ‘Your name?’

Taber gave it. ‘I am already registered at your headquarters. I am an official guest of your government.’

‘The senorita?’

‘Senorita McKenna. She is a guest of Senor Alejandro Ruiz Cordobes, staying in his house.’

The officer’s face twitched as if he had been stung; or as if the drug of authority had suddenly worn off. He stuffed the leaflet into a pocket of his tunic, saluted perfunctorily, then turned on his heel and without another word went out of the lobby. The hotel owner let out a loud sigh; it sounded as if he had pressed the valve on the cylinder he still held. He looked at Taber.

‘The police chief himself, Captain Condoris. He has never been here before. Let us hope he does not come back.’

‘He won’t,’ said Taber, wondering why the police chief had not sent a junior officer after him. Or had Condoris thought he, Taber, had been an accomplice of the robbers and had had thoughts of making a spectacular arrest himself? He’s made a fool of himself, Taber thought, and he’s not going to like me from now on. ‘Get your boy to call a taxi, Senor Vazov.’

When the taxi arrived, Taber took Carmel out, put her in and closed the door. He leaned in the open window. ‘Go straight back to the Ruiz’s. No sightseeing, at least not till tomorrow.’

‘Will things be all right again by tomorrow?’

‘They’ll be all right again in an hour or two. But it would be better if you didn’t go out on your own again today, just in case there’s some more shooting.’

‘Will there be more of that?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes in these countries the soldiers or police shoot up a suspect’s home just as a warning. They order everyone out of the house, then let fly. It’s bad luck if someone gets in the way of a bullet.’

She shuddered, lay back against the torn leatherette of the taxi’s seat; stuffing stuck out beside her head like grey moss. ‘I think I’ll be glad to leave here.’

He felt a slight twinge of regret. ‘I’ll be sorry to see you go’

She leant forward. ‘I haven’t thanked you.’

‘What for?’

‘For looking after me the way you did. You’re not bad, Mr Taber.’ She looked at him and nodded approvingly, looking through the exterior of him as an intelligent woman would. ‘I’ve met much worse.’

‘That’s the story of my life. Negative compliments.’ But he grinned, pleased by what she had said. In his turn he had met much worse than her, but he didn’t tell her that. ‘I’ll see you tonight. Ruiz has invited me to the welcome home reception for his son.’

The taxi, an old fin-tailed Plymouth, drove off, its transmission grinding alarmingly. I hope she makes it, Taber thought; and chided himself for not thinking to call Pereira for the Land-Rover. He found himself wishing that no harm should come to Carmel McKenna.

As he turned to go back up into the hotel he saw the policeman, a young stupid-looking Indian, already taking up his watching post on the other side of the street. Christ Almighty, Taber thought, they’re so afraid they have to suspect everyone.

2

Alejandro Ruiz moved through the slow surf of his guests like a dreadnought looking for a place to beach itself. He was accustomed to people coming to him, but this evening his wife had insisted that he must circulate.

‘You make me sound like a red corpuscle,’ he had protested.

‘Not red, my dear. You would have to be blue.’

Their exchange of humour had the usual heaviness of domestic sarcasm, but this evening there had been no real sourness between them. Both of them were so pleased to have Francisco home again with them that their lack of patience with each other, and their occasional deep bitterness, had been put aside. Alejandro was happy to play host to his friends at this party in honour of Francisco, but he was not happy to be told to remain on his feet all evening like his own butler. Especially since there were some guests, not friends, for whom, in normal circumstances, he would never rise to his feet.

Carmel, looking about her as she stood in the big living-room, felt she could have been in Seville. She had spent a month there two years ago when she had thought she was falling in love with a film director who had proved to be in love with bull-fighters. It had been an unsatisfactory month and a further part of her education in men, but she had enjoyed the Seville social scene, though she would not have wanted to belong to it permanently. This was a smaller Seville and suggested a much older one. But that impression came only from the men; the women, rebelling in their own way, in fashion, looked as smart and modern as any she had seen in Europe. No see-through dresses or precipitously plunging necklines, but then aristocrats never went in for those attention-getters anyway. And these people, though they held no titles, looked upon themselves as aristocrats.

She had left off her own see-through blouses in favour of the only modest dress she owned, a black Givenchy that was her all-purpose model. She saw her brother looking approvingly at her and she moved to join him. ‘It’s my papal audience dress.’

‘Did you get to see him?’

‘No. Mother wanted me to go with her last year, but it seemed too hypocritical. I haven’t been to Mass in, oh, I don’t know how long.’

‘How about coming tomorrow morning? I’m saying early Mass at the cathedral.’

‘I’ll see. What time?’

‘Six o’clock.’

‘Oh my God, you’re joking! If I’m ever up at six, it’s only because I haven’t been to bed the night before.’ Then she saw the disappointment, which he had tried to hide, in his face. She pressed his arm. ‘All right, darling. I’ll try to be there. I’ve never heard you say Mass. I don’t think Mother has forgiven me for that.’

‘I’m not the best of performers,’ he said, trying to get rid of the shadow of their mother. ‘Some fellers are real showmen. Don’t expect a spectacular.’

Then a woman, a year or two older than Carmel, came through the swirl of guests towards them. She was not strictly beautiful, except for her eyes which were dark and had extraordinarily long lashes, but there was something about her that held one’s attention while more beautiful women in the room passed by. This one would never need a see-through blouse, thought Carmel. She was not sure what the other woman had: perhaps it was her air of serenity, but it was a serenity that suggested control rather than the passivity that some of the older women in the room had. Hidden in the woman was some passion, for love or truth or justice, for something. She would not take life for granted and that, too, set her apart from so many of the other women at the reception.

‘Carmel, this is Dolores Schiller.’ McKenna’s face had lit up as the woman had approached them. Carmel noticed it, but put it down to her brother’s relief at being interrupted; she knew now that their mother was always going to be a difficult subject between them. ‘She is the mission’s biggest supporter.’

‘What I give the mission is a pittance.’ Her voice was so soft that Carmel, in the hubbub of other voices, had to lean forward to hear her.

‘I meant your moral support,’ said McKenna. ‘Everyone else here thinks I’m wasting my time or I’m just a nuisance.’

‘Are you a newcomer like me?’ Carmel asked.

Dolores Schiller smiled. ‘One side of the family has been here as long as the Ruiz. But my grandfather interrupted the sequence – he was a German and a rather lowly one, I’m afraid. He was a socialist journalist, something the family did not discover till after he and my grandmother were married. They had eloped, which no one ever did in San Sebastian society, not in those days.’

Then Taber, looking uncomfortable in a black tie and dinner jacket, loomed up beside them. His red hair had been slicked down with water when he arrived, but now it was once again beginning to rebel against its combing.

‘You look absolutely elegant,’ said Carmel. ‘But where’s your tweed cap?’

‘If you think I look elegant, you’re either astigmatic or you have no taste,’ said Taber with a grin. ‘When I approach Savile Row back home, they throw up the barricades. I’m on their black list.’

McKenna introduced him to Dolores Schiller, who said, ‘I’ve heard about you, Senor Taber, from Hernando Ruiz. He admired your remark the other day, about the Indians’ patient tolerance of us criollos.’

‘I’m surprised he did,’ said Taber. ‘It was an unintentional insult to all the Ruiz. Fact is, I’m surprised I was asked to come this evening.’

‘The Ruiz have a certain tolerance of their own. Mainly because of Senora Romola.’

An elderly couple drifted by, the man tall and straight-backed, white-haired and with a military moustache, the woman with blue-rinsed grey hair and an expression of such superiority that Carmel wondered if she spoke even to her husband. They bowed to Dolores Schiller, who put out a hand to them.

‘Doctor and Senora Partridge—’ She introduced them to the McKennas and Taber.

‘Howdyoudo.’ It was all one word the way Dr Partridge said it. ‘Absolutely splendid party, what? Lots of dashed pretty gels. Always make for a jolly show.’

I’m hearing things, thought Carmel.

‘My husband is always looking at the gels,’ said Senora Partridge. ‘Still thinks he is a medical student, you know. Silly old dear, aren’t you, Bunty?’

They can’t be real, Carmel thought. These were people right out of those old British movies of the nineteen thirties that one saw on the Late Late Late Show; the Partridges belonged with Clive Brook and Constance Collier and the country cottage in the Home Counties. ‘Have you been out here long?’ she said.

The Partridges looked offended. ‘We belong here. Well, not here, actually. We came up here – when was it, old gel?’

‘Never remember years,’ said Senora Partridge, and laughed a horse’s laugh straight out of the pages of The Tatler: Dr and Senora Partridge enjoy a gay joke at the Hunt Ball. ‘Never pays at my age, you know.’

They moved on, vice-regally, and Carmel, slightly stupefied, looked at her brother. ‘Are they for real?’

‘They’re Anglo-Brazilians. They’ve never seen England, except for a three weeks’ honeymoon God knows how long ago. They still talk about the Royal garden party that they went to and how King George the Fifth shook hands with the doc.’

‘They’re more British than the British!’

‘You find them all over South America,’ said Taber. ‘Still whistling Land of Hope and Glory in the bathroom, celebrating the Queen’s Birthday, cursing Harold Wilson and the Socialists – you can’t laugh at them, you have to feel sorry for them. They are born here, they live here all their lives, yet they can never bring themselves to call it home. Home is where their father or their grandfather came from.’

‘Oh, my God, how sad!’

McKenna said to Taber, ‘I want to thank you for getting Carmel out of that trouble this morning. You’re making a habit of helping out the McKennas.’

‘What trouble was that?’ said Dolores Schiller. ‘When the guerrillas blew up the bank?’

‘We were just across the plaza,’ said Carmel; then glanced at Taber, looking at him with a new eye tonight. ‘Did your friend the police chief come back?’

‘He’s coming back now,’ said Taber. ‘Who’s the bloke with him, Terry?’

McKenna had only time to say, ‘Karl Obermaier. He’s an ex-Nazi. Or maybe not so ex.’

Condoris, the police chief, and the short muscular man with him paused in front of Dolores Schiller, both bowing and clicking their heels. This is an unreal, three-o’clock-in-the-morning night, Carmel thought: where is Conrad Veidt?

‘Senorita Schiller, how was the ski-ing?’ Condoris asked in Spanish, ignoring the three foreigners.

‘I go ski-ing in Chile every winter,’ Dolores explained to Carmel; then still speaking English she introduced Carmel and Taber to the German. Her snub of the police chief was as blunt as a blow to his long sharp nose. But he did not flush or blink an eye; he was obviously accustomed to being snubbed in company like this. But he must know how necessary he is, to put up with it, thought Taber; and looked with sharper interest at Condoris. The man knew where the bodies were buried; or, worse still, knew where they were going to be buried.

Obermaier, having bowed and clicked his heels, now stood with his hands behind his back. He had a strong emperor’s face, the sort one saw on Roman coins; Taber wondered what empire he ran here. Obermaier was not the first ex-Nazi he had met in South America, but he was certainly the cockiest. He looked Taber up and down like a Storm Trooper colonel inspecting a new recruit.

‘Captain Condoris tells me you were almost shot by the terrorists, Senor Taber.’

Well, I’m glad he didn’t call me Herr Taber. ‘I think it was a threat more than a real intention.’

‘Their intentions are real enough, Senor Taber. We have to stamp them out – ruthlessly.’

Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil. Hold on, mate, this isn’t Europe in the thirties. ‘We, Herr Obermaier?’

‘It is the task of everyone who lives here in Bolivia. Or anywhere in South America.’

‘Does Herr Bormann believe that, too?’

There was just a faint stiffening of Obermaier’s face. ‘Herr Bormann?’

‘Martin Bormann. I understand he lives in Paraguay, on the Bolivian border.’

‘You should not believe the propaganda, Senor Taber. Martin Bormann died in Berlin at the end of the war.’

Dolores Schiller broke up the tension. Her voice faintly mocking, she said, ‘Senor Obermaier escaped from Berlin just at that time. He came here and helped train our army up till the revolution occurred. You were a panzer commander, weren’t you, Karl? He follows in an old tradition – Germans have always been popular here in Bolivia. Except Socialist ones, of course,’ she said with a tiny smile. ‘Captain Ernst Roehm trained our army before he went back to Germany and led the SS for Hitler.’

‘A panzer commander?’ said Carmel, thinking the baiting of Obermaier had gone too far. After what she had seen this morning she had become afraid of violence, knowing she would no longer be surprised where it broke out.

Obermaier waved a deprecating hand, but even that gesture looked cocky. He’s cocky, not arrogant, thought Taber. There’s a difference; and saw the difference when he looked around the room at Alejandro Ruiz and some of the older criollos. ‘What do you do now, Herr Obermaier?’

‘I run the brewery,’ said Obermaier. ‘I come from Munich. Naturally, I understand beer.’

‘Naturally,’ said Taber; but Obermaier was another man who did not understand irony.

‘Will the terrorists blow up the brewery?’ Carmel asked.

‘That could be one of their prime targets,’ said Taber.

‘Why should it be that, Senor Taber?’ demanded Obermaier.

Taber shrugged, looking innocent. ‘I don’t know. But one can never be sure what terrorists will blow up. I have had more experience of them than you, Herr Obermaier.’

He knew he had said the wrong thing as soon as he saw Captain Condoris look hard at him; he had thought the police chief did not understand English. ‘What experience have you had, Senor Taber?’

‘Only indirectly, Captain. I have worked in countries where some of my projects have been blown up.’

‘What countries were they?’

‘I never speak ill of old clients,’ said Taber.

McKenna got him off the hook. ‘The raid on the bank this morning was pretty stupid. I understand they didn’t even try to heist any of the money. Is that right, Captain?’

‘Heist?’ Condoris did not understand American slang.

‘Did they attempt to steal any money?’

‘No.’

‘So they killed a policeman and blinded the bank clerk. What good will that do their cause?’

‘No good at all. We should have more such raids.’ Alejandro Ruiz, tired of circulating, had seated himself in one of the monk’s chairs beside the group. ‘We should throw open the banks, let them overdraw on their account of what goodwill they have with the campesinos. The dead policeman’s father is a campesino. The clerk was a mestizo, with a dozen cousins who are campesinos.’ He read the expression on Taber’s face. ‘You are surprised at my knowledge, Senor Taber? I own the bank. Today’s raid was a demonstration against me personally.’

Carmel, still unsettled by this casual talk of terrorism, said, ‘Aren’t you afraid they might try to raid your house tonight? I mean—’ She gestured at the guests, every one a possible target for the revolutionaries.

‘Why do you think the chief of police is here? How many men do you have out in the plaza, Captain?’

‘Fifty,’ said Condoris. ‘Another thirty in the field behind your house. You are safe, Senor Ruiz.’

Ruiz nodded, taking his impregnability for granted. ‘We shall soon be rid of them. They will never succeed, because they are mostly outsiders and the campesinos will have nothing to do with them when it comes to full revolution.’

‘What if they raise a local leader, one of us?’ Dolores Schiller’s voice had risen a little: no one had to lean forward to hear her now.

‘Where will they get him?’

Dolores shook her head. ‘You are the only one who is so confident. The rest of us—’ The other guests drifted past, their small talk showing the smallness of their circle: they had no one to talk about but themselves. They had already exhausted the main topic of the evening, the bombing of the bank: it dignified one’s enemies to discuss them too long and too openly. But they were uneasy, moving restlessly throughout the house, as if to stand too long in the one place would only invite attack. ‘Have you asked the young men what they think, Francisco and Hernando?’

On cue Francisco came up, nodded coolly to Taber, then put his hand possessively under Carmel’s arm. ‘My friends want to meet you. Everyone on this side of the room looks so serious—’

Carmel went with Francisco, and Alejandro Ruiz laughed. ‘There is your answer, Dolores. The younger men want only to enjoy themselves.’

‘Tonight, perhaps,’ said Dolores. ‘But tomorrow—?’

No one was prepared to discuss tomorrow. Obermaier and Condoris moved off, bowing stiffly like twin automatons as they passed people; Taber wondered if Condoris had ever been a cadet under Obermaier. McKenna took Dolores’s arm. ‘I think I’d better go and pay my respects to the Bishop. He’s over there with his Jesuit buddy from the university. Maybe they can tell us about tomorrow.’

‘Not my brother,’ said Alejandro Ruiz. ‘He leaves tomorrow to God.’

‘And the Jesuit?’

‘He will prefer to discuss the past. He’s been fed on logic and logic is safer when discussing history. You’ll never find a crystal ball in a Jesuit’s cell.’

Taber and Ruiz were left alone. They looked at each other, Taber warily, Ruiz with the confident stare of a man master in his own house. ‘Have you improved anything since we last met, Senor Taber?’

‘Nothing,’ Taber admitted. ‘But I’ve only just learned you are chairman of the local Agrarian Reform Council. Perhaps you can help me improve things.’

‘How?’

‘I have a shipment held up by the local Customs chief. I think he is waiting for some graft.’

‘Did he ask you for money?’

‘You know he wouldn’t do that. But I know the system as well as you, Senor Ruiz.’

‘I pay graft to no one.’

I’m suffering from foot-in-mouth disease, Taber thought. ‘I did not mean to suggest that you did. But neither do I – pay graft, I mean. That’s why I have several thousand dollars’ worth of stuff stuck down at the railway yards and can’t get at it.’

Ruiz had seen his wife, across the room, nod peremptorily at him to begin recirculating. He got wearily to his feet, sourly aware that there were times when he was not master in his own house. ‘I shall see what can be done, Senor Taber. But I can promise nothing. There is room for improvement in our Customs.’

Taber had a sudden intuition: Ruiz was putting him on trial. Everything he was going to do for FAO here in San Sebastian province would eventually have to go through the Agrarian Reform Council. Nothing would come out of Customs till he had proved himself. And proving himself meant proving that he was not a radical, that he would not advocate too much change.

‘Excuse me,’ said Ruiz. ‘I have my other guests to attend to.’

Taber was left alone. He looked across the room and saw Carmel surrounded by half a dozen young men and girls; she smiled at him, then she was blotted out by Francisco, who moved deliberately in front of her. Taber looked around, saw the Partridges bearing down on him, and escaped into a side room. Obermaier and Condoris were there, heads close together; they looked up as he came into the room, then turned away. He moved on, looking for a place to sit, to put up his feet and be alone. He might even try getting slightly drunk on Obermaier’s beer, if he could find any.

He stopped one of the servants. ‘Could you get me two – no, four bottles of beer? Brewery beer, not chicha.’ He wanted none of the Indians’ maize beer. ‘I’ll be in this room here.’

It was not so much a room as an alcove off the long hall. He sat down in another monk’s chair, thinking, Christ, isn’t there a comfortable chair anywhere in this house? Did the bloody Spaniards believe in making themselves uncomfortable when they sat, as a penance for all their other excesses? He felt he was being watched and he looked up into a pair of gimlet eyes on the wall: a Ruiz glared at him from the seventeenth century. Get stuffed, Alejandro or Francisco or Hernando or whatever-the-hell-your-name-was. None of you, neither past Ruiz nor present Ruiz, is going to stop me doing my job here. I may never feel at home in your house, I will never be part of history; but none of that is going to stop me from doing my job. I’m here to improve things, to change things, and I’m going to bloody well do my best to see that it happens. So put that in your arquebus and see if you can fire it.

He heard voices coming down the hall and he sat farther back in the chair, hoping he would not be seen. McKenna and Dolores Schiller went by, heads close together, talking in low voices. They had passed on out of sight before Taber realized how close together they had been. He could not remember ever having seen a priest and a young attractive woman walking hand in hand like lovers.

3

Carmel heard the door of her bedroom open quietly, then close again. She sat up in bed, at once feeling the cold air that came in through the open window. Francisco, in pyjamas and thick dressing-gown, crossed to the window and closed it. Then he came and stood by the side of the bed.

‘I haven’t come to your room before. I know how the altitude bothers one at first.’

‘It is still bothering me, Pancho. Too much for any of that.’

‘Lie down or you will catch cold.’ He looked around the room, dimly lit by the moonlight filtering through the curtained window. He found the large convector heater and plugged it in. ‘Father really should have the house centrally heated.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘He’s a man.’

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

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

‘I do not like vulgar women.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You were not in danger.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The guerrillas do not kill innocent bystanders.’

‘They killed an innocent policeman.’

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

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

‘Carissima—’

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

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

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

‘Do you know what love is?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Three
1

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve decided to come to Mass. Okay?’

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

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