Free The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Louis De Bernières

the stars, wet with dew upon the blanket and between her thighs, she dreamed repeatedly of the eloquence of his nether parts. She dreamed that his polla, famed charger that it was, leapt out of a cupboard and winked at her. Its eye changed to a mouth and smiled knowingly. It hopped across the floor and sprang into her lap, rubbing itself against her palm as a kitten rubs its ears, and its purring was the same purring as the somnolent snores of the jaguars asleep amongst the people. Then suddenly she was afloat in a creamy sea of vanilla-flavoured sperm with the moon above her transforming the sea to silver, and a dolphin vaulted out of the ocean, changing in mid-arch into Don Emmanuel’s pink appendage. There was a moment of terror in case it was a shark, but then she was born aloft upon it and rode towards the gap between the stars that the Indians call ‘the pig’. In the morning Don Emmanuel approached her and said, ‘I had a dream of you,’ and she knew that when the expedition was concluded she would embark upon a voyage of love ordained.
    When they passed through Santa Maria Virgen the inhabitants showed no interest; they watched with empty eyes. Only the little children, malnourished and filthy but as yet unpoisoned by basuco, clapped their hands with excitement or ran indoors for fear of the great bulls and the prowling cats. A pall of dust was raised, which settled onto the neglected houses and the leaves of the almond trees, and irritated the lungs of the addicts too apathetic to cough.
    The people were abashed by the size of the reel; ‘Ay, ay, ay,’ they exclaimed, ‘this is the grandfather of all reels, this is the one final historical reel forever. How can we move this?’ Everyone stood in silence, until the squint-eyed man who used to be the policeman and the mayor of Chiriguana, and who loved his goats so much that hehad even brought them on the expedition, pointed to an electrical pole and said, ‘There is our axle, amigos.’
    It was a tall stout pole of tarred pine, a relic of the Norwegian electrification programme funded by the United Nations. It leaned over, as though it had been awaiting the chance to jump out of its hole and do something useful, and no wires hung from its ceramic bobbins.
    There was a magnificent ceibu bull named Cacho Mocho that belonged to Don Emmanuel. It was the king of all the bulls, and had been the only one permitted to eat the flowers in Don Emmanuel’s garden; he had had to stop putting gates on his fields because Cacho Mocho, despite his broken horn, knew how to lift the gates off their hinges and lay them gently on the ground. It had been Cacho Mocho who had led the cattle during the emigration, and he who had led them during this journey. His testicles were so heavy that men would wince to see them swing against his legs and crash into rocks.
    Tomás shinned up to the top of the pole and fastened a stout rope to it whilst Hectoro and Misael put the harness onto Cacho Mocho and fastened the other end of the rope to it. When Tomás was down, Pedro whispered a secreto in the ear of the bull and patted him on the flank. Cacho Mocho plodded forward. The rope tautened and the bull’s muscles knotted and flexed beneath his skin. There was a brief moment of equilibrium when it seemed as though nothing would happen, and then the pole toppled, tearing the soil away at its root. Cacho Mocho fell forward onto his shins, bellowed with triumph, and stood up. Everybody cheered, and the bull feinted proudly with his single horn.
    They lifted the pole above their heads and fed it through the hole at the centre of the reel. From then on it was a three-hour labour to harness together all the cattle, the horses and the mules, to take ropes from the axle, and to begin the formidable journey back to Cochadebajo de los Gatos with Cacho Mocho in the lead.
    Even though Aurelio had established the quickest and least precipitious routes, it was a fortnight of impediments and temptation to