You Shall Leave Your Land Page 2

  ‘Whose name are we going to put, then?’ Nicolasa said, fretful. Her voice was tremulous.

  ‘It will have to be another man’s name.’

  ‘Another man’s name?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a question of inventing one,’ Gregorio said, boldly.

  So this was the mission, the grievous mission delegated to Nicolasa: the invention of a father for the child. A legal, yet fictitious father. A fantasy father who would free the newborn from being treated as what he was, at bottom, and would always be: a bastard. The bastard son of a priest who could not or would not or dared not recognise him as his own before the eyes of God and of men. The first of the seven bastard children that he, the Reverend Don José Gregorio de Cartagena y Meneses, would have with Doña Nicolasa Cisneros La Torre, whose illegitimate relationship lasted almost half a century.

  In her fright, or rather panic, Nicolasa would have preferred to refuse, but she unhesitatingly accepted the assignment, with the resolve that already defined her character at the age of twenty-eight. Over the following days, as she walked with Dominga Prieto through the monotonous fields of rice and other crops grown at the Andaymayo hacienda, she dedicated herself to fleshing out the identity of her son’s imaginary father, her brand-

  new ghostly husband. She weighed up first names, rejected common surnames, considered the sound of the two conjoined names, seeking something both agreeable to the ear and wholly unusual. She repeated them aloud, savouring them on the tongue, until she was left with just one. Dominga Prieto listened in silence, asking herself if Nicolasa’s ideas were real or just ravings.

  This was the origin of Don Roberto Benjamín. A man enigmatic to all, whom no one had heard of because he never existed. Roberto Benjamín was a fiction, an artifice, a hasty lie that nonetheless endured. A being imagined into life by a woman whose joy at becoming a mother sparred with the inevitable bitterness of living out her maternity banished to the shadows.

  A few months later, as was stipulated, the child received the holy sacrament in the church of La Merced in Huánuco, at an ordinary mass baptism not attended by Cartagena, and which concluded with attendees tossing abundant handfuls of flour in the air as a show of joy. When the time came to state the name of her son, Nicolasa called him Juan and asked the registrar to record on the certificate that Juan Benjamín Cisneros was the ‘legitimate son of Don Roberto Benjamín and Doña Nicolasa Cisneros’.

  Only Dominga Prieto accompanied her on that sunless day and stayed by her side, stiff but serene, with the same composure and companionable spirit she maintained at the christenings of the other children born successively between 1828 and 1837, all receiving the same well-intended yet fraudulent surname: Benjamín. The children would grow up asking after Don Roberto, their putative father, who was always away on business as a metals trader in indistinct far-off countries, from which he was always ‘about to return’. They would also grow used to seeing the priest, Gregorio, their biological father, as an affectionate godparent, a stole-wearing relative who was often around the house to act as tutor, correct their mistakes, and sometimes, if they behaved, slip them unconsecrated communion wafers that melted like snow on the tongue.

  Shortly before Juan’s birth, in February 1828, Gregorio Cartagena, already the parish priest of Huácar, had founded a school he called the College of Virtue. In April, having served for a year as elected deputy for the province of Junín, he joined the Congress that would promulgate Peru’s third constitution. He had recently turned forty and, despite this relative youth, he was already a parish priest, school director, member of the National Assembly, father of the fatherland, lover of a woman and progenitor of a secret child.

  For her part, Nicolasa had not found motherhood to be overly taxing thanks to the know-how she’d earned growing up. Her parents – two Spaniards who arrived in Peru in the late 1700s and settled in Huánuco hoping to get rich from the mountains of gold they eventually tired of seeking – had died of tuberculosis when she was seventeen. As a result, under the watchful eye of Dominga Prieto, she had to take care of her six younger siblings: Antonio, Pedro, Pablo, Gerónimo, Armenio and Rosita. In acquiring these maternal traits early, Nicolasa had gained household expertise, and by the time she was twenty she was conscientious, self-sufficient and resolute in the face of the slightest setback. So much so that, years later, none of her siblings questioned the clandestine nature of her pregnancy nor of her mysterious marriage, and instead received news of their first nephew Juan with joy.

  Their care not to discomfort their older sister with untoward questions didn’t mean they weren’t curious about the origins of this elusive Roberto Benjamín, this fellow of euphonic name, honourable no doubt, who had married Nicolasa overnight and become their brother-in-law without any of them having met or even seen him in those parts. The siblings were intrigued but not nosy, and only behind closed doors and in low voices did they give free rein to their speculations and hopes to soon meet this Roberto, to fête him and officially welcome him to the family. An occasion that, naturally, would never arrive.

  * * *

  Gregorio Cartagena had caught sight of Nicolasa for the first time at eleven o’clock in the morning on Friday the fifteenth of December, 1820. Though the heat was rising, a fine rain fell on Huánuco’s central square. One week earlier, learning of the recent auspicious victory of the patriotic army over the Spanish royalist forces, the citizens had unanimously declared themselves in favour of independence at an open meeting. And so, on that Friday in December, at eleven on the dot, embodying the will of the local people, Nicolás de Herrera – the delegate of General Álvarez de Arenales, right-hand man of the general leading the liberation forces, the Argentinian José de San Martín – climbed onto a makeshift stage of four tables adorned with an embroidered cloth, and from this perch, surrounded by the men, women and children who had come from the nearby villages of Huamalíes, Huallanca and Ambo, all wearing rather impromptu festive attire and expressions of some puzzlement at what they were witnessing, and with the muddy landscape as a backdrop, took a deep breath to proclaim:

  ‘Huanuqueños, do you swear by God and the cross to be free of the crown and rule of the King of Spain, and to be faithful to the homeland?’

  The Yes, I swear! of the assembled population echoed across the valley.

  There followed multiple cries of Viva! accompanied by a haphazard pealing of bells, the general din of an improvised street party, the intoning of Te Deums and Misereres in the town’s seventeen churches, and the incessant popping of homemade rockets and fireworks that sent out brief explosions of light. Alcohol was soon passing from hand to hand and gradually the celebration spiralled out of control. The fiesta meant for one night lasted two days and in some households carried on for three.

  In those initial minutes of joy and confusion among the throng, young Nicolasa stepped among the streamers and strings of oil lights newly hung around the square. A few yards away, Gregorio Cartagena – who had taken part in the open meeting – watched as the revellers broke up into tight bunches, shaking their rattles, taking leaps and turns, feeling the first symptoms of freedom in their very blood. As he slowly raised his head, he caught sight of Nicolasa. It was immediate. He stood motionless for several seconds, unable to take his eyes off her. When it seemed to him that she had finally noticed his presence, he flashed an automatic and effusive grin, as if his facial muscles and his brain had not previously agreed upon the necessity or propriety of this smile, so easily misinterpreted by someone – by the nearby member of the town council, for example, who was already turning to him with a frown. Feeling exposed, Gregorio rearranged his expression into something more appropriate, turned on his heel and hurried off. He hadn’t gone far before he was overwhelmed by the temptation to look back. Nicolasa was still there. Again he was shaken by the energy she radiated, the sensuality of her movements, the grace and dexterity with which she handled the flaming torch that only men were su
pposed to carry. All this was enough for him to conjecture that she must have grown up accustomed to overcoming hardship, and dissimulating her need for protection. He stood there a while longer, prudently observing her from afar, dazzled by her eyes, the most voracious and exalted eyes he had ever seen. Gregorio had no way to foresee that by his side, as a result of his actions, those same eyes would become a sad depository of affliction.

  Nevertheless, they wouldn’t meet each other properly until four years later, in the first days of 1824.

  On Friday, 19 December, 1823, the Venezuelan military leader Simón Bolívar, known as the Liberator, arrived in Huánuco on his march to Cerro de Pasco. He had already spent three months in Peru, leading an expedition that sought to put an end to the last bastions of the Spanish viceroyalty and consolidate the independence declared by San Martín in 1821. Mounted on Palomo – the mythical white horse with high tail and well-greased hoofs that had accompanied him since Panama; no one else was permitted to attach the bit shank, stroke his nose or spur him on – Bolívar disguised his short, skinny frame with the uniform of the Grenadiers: high-necked dress coat, tails as far as the back of the knee, embroidered epaulettes, tricoloured sash, tight breeches over blue trousers, knee-high leather gaiters, steel spurs, elegant cape and a dashing plumed bicorne hat.

  That Friday, Bolívar decided to spend the night in Huácar. He needed to bolster the ranks of his regiment and gather supplies and cattle for his men, and so he judged it fit to approach whoever was in charge there. The residents offered him only one name, because they couldn’t think of anyone but Gregorio Cartagena. Who better than the parish priest, they reckoned, to help him secure rations and attract volunteers to join the liberating army. Bolívar sent for him. Once he had been introduced and they had exchanged brief opinions on this and that, the military leader determined the priest to be a trustworthy man, and made him a key liaison in the central sierra. Over the following weeks and months, whenever he found himself in the vicinity of Huánuco, he would seek out the priest for news of his progress.

  From the outset, Gregorio was a sincere supporter of Bolívar’s project, unaware of his dictatorial ambitions and the disdain with which he referred to Peruvians in private. At first he limited himself to conveying the latest goings-on in the area, but later, anxious not to awaken ill-intentioned suspicions or to be seen as a tattletale or informer, he asked to be put in charge of recruitment in Huácar. His request granted, Cartagena began to organise the weekly call-ups in the town square, announcing them after officiating holy mass at noon and reading the parish news. Dozens of men and women, retired soldiers, young folk without trades, pensioners and even precocious children attended these recruiting sessions, all inflamed with patriotic fervour, fully committed to the cause of freedom, and anxious to be part of a story that was still unfinished; indeed, that for many was just beginning to be written.

  Unlike provinces where conscription was brutal and indiscriminate, proceedings in the town of Huácar were civil thanks to the intervention of Gregorio, who weeded out the volunteers according to his own criteria, without paying much attention to those stipulated by Bolívar: ‘Remember that I have no use for cowards ready to desert, nor good-for-nothings who question orders, nor wimps who fall ill from lack of sleep.’

  It was at one such session, on a Sunday in January, that Nicolasa Cisneros appeared alongside her brother Pedro, the third-born and the closest to her in character, a twenty-year-old soldier with sideburns who, like, many others, had stood down from the ranks of the Spanish forces and was now enlisting to fight them instead. Gregorio Cartagena recognised her straight away. As he stretched out a hand of welcome, he observed her unmistakable prominent cheekbones, the red bud of her mouth, and finally her eyes, whose elongated and opaque colour he would come to associate, many years later, with eucalyptus leaves.

  In a matter of seconds, without ignoring Pedro – who was seeking to impress him by embarking on an ardent speech of patriotic love – Gregorio recalled the sequence of events that December four years earlier: the drizzle in Huánuco, the words spoken by Nicolás de Herrera, the peals of bells, the rockets, the flaming torches. He then realised he had never forgotten this woman of angular beauty who, on that morning in 1820, amid the crowd congregated in the Plaza de Armas, had joined in with the euphoric shouts of Viva!, sung along with the multitude and embraced her fellows after the town’s declaration of independence.

  Since that day, Cartagena had thought of her so often that now he had her in front of him for a second time, now that she was no longer an ideal or a mirage or a memory, now that he knew her name, he didn’t hesitate in treating the reencounter as a gift of fate, an opportunity granted him by some divine agency that would allow him to explore the single realm where his desires were still a turbulent sea.

  * * *

  Gregorio had advanced in his priestly vocation without missing out on any of the ranks he aspired to hold or tasks he sought to perform. It was far from easy. His career in the Church only really gathered steam once he had weathered the consequences of the licentious behaviour he had displayed in his early days in Lima, when he was studying for ordination as sub-deacon.

  The very day he was ordained, on Tuesday, 14 March 1815, just hours after the ceremony in the cathedral, a citizen by the name of Juan Antonio Monserrat approached the Vicariate to denounce him. ‘I have come to bear witness before this ecclesiastical office to the inappropriate behaviour and moral insolvency of a young priest by the name of Cartagena,’ Monserrat declared. He went on to explain that ‘he is known to be engaged in an amorous liaison, and to have insulted honourable individuals under the influence of drink.’

  Around about that time, Gregorio was often to be seen at the fiestas held by Josefa Posadas, a woman of overflowing bosom and slim hips who had ‘a gift for singing, playing guitar and telling tales’ before an audience of her neighbours in the Lima district of Los Huérfanos. Every evening, Josefa would receive dozens of guests and entertain them into the early hours, much to the displeasure of the man who was still her husband at that time, a doltish and bad-tempered fellow by the name of Ramón Heredia, who spent his time spying on her and refusing to accept the definitive separation Josefa had proposed, fed up with his idleness and neglect. Of all the visitors she hosted, the one who aroused most jealousy in Ramón Heredia was the young Cartagena, whose status as a priest seemed to present no impediment when he chose, at any hour of the day and in the middle of the street, to deploy a daring repertoire of winks, flattery and compliments in Josefa’s direction, which she would receive with sly glances, and which Ramón qualified as outrageous and sacrilegious, given who they came from. Over the course of two months, Heredia and the priest had ‘quarrels and differences of opinion that concluded without harm done’, but on the day of Cartagena’s ordination, they overstepped the boundary they had unwittingly traced.

  That Tuesday, passing by the cathedral as he did every morning, Ramón Heredia crossed himself in relief to see Gregorio join the line of newly minted sub-deacons, thinking that the twenty-seven-year-old, at last taking his religious calling to heart, would now leave Josefa alone, allowing him to restore the peace with his wife. Ramón approached the church door and, just as the sub-deacons knelt before the altar, he glanced at the sky and was struck by the symmetrical outlines of two clouds suggesting the entwined forms of a man and a woman. He smiled inwardly, convinced that this must be a sign from above, a clear declaration that there was still hope for his marriage. He left, serene, but when he returned home unannounced three hours later, he found Josefa Posadas together with Cartagena, ‘drinking liquor in excess and in an attitude of imminent intimacy’. His ingenuous premonitions shattered, he began to yell like a man possessed. Overcome by fury, he propelled the priest out of the building and challenged him to ‘settle it there in the street, like men’.

  Once they were outside, the two of them squared up, ready to throw punches, hissing threats, st
aring at each other with a distaste that verged on disgust, unflinching before the gaze of the men and women who crept closer until they formed a whispering circle around them. Josefa Posadas alternated entreaties with coarse shrieks. Gregorio rolled up the sleeves of his habit and took up a fighting stance, while Ramón Heredia hiked up his trousers, eyes fixed on his enemy.

  ‘You can’t hide from me anymore, Cartagena!’

  ‘One who is at peace with himself has no need to hide.’

  Ramón’s jaw trembled with rage, but the self-control of the tipsy priest was a thing to see.

  ‘Degenerate! That’s what you are!’

  The men and women murmured in surprise.

  ‘Watch your tongue, Ramón, you don’t want these fine people to think that jealousy is clouding your brain.’

  The two moved in circles, sizing each other up.

  ‘And you watch your faith, if you have any that is!’

  ‘Bravo, Heredia!’ a voice called from the crowd. Other male voices echoed the exhortation.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ramón. The best thing you can do is leave.’

  ‘The one who should leave is you. There’s no room for hypocrites in this neighbourhood.’

  The crowd’s applause in support of his opponent made Gregorio hesitate for the first time. He looked for Josefa Posadas, but couldn’t find her.

  ‘Not even going to open your trap to beg an apology, are you?’

  ‘I was unaware I had offended you.’

  ‘Oh, and now you deny it…’

  ‘Does anyone have the slightest idea what this man is talking about?’ Gregorio asked the onlookers.

  ‘Confess, you liar!’ growled Heredia.

  ‘I have nothing to say to anyone. Least of all to you.’

  ‘You’re chancing your luck, but it’ll run out sooner or later.’

  ‘The only thing that’s running out is my patience, Ramón.’