Mask of the Andes. Jon Cleary
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