Free The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Louis De Bernières Page A

despair. Never has there been so much yelling and cursing, so much dust clogging the eyes and throat, and never has mankind laboured so fiercely in absolute equality with its animals. The paths winding through the mountains were useless because they were scarcely evermore than a metre wide, having been established in the first place by the navigational instincts of wild goats, and so the people went directly, Indian-fashion. They cleared scrub, heaved away boulders, forded rushing torrents, descended and ascended vertiginous slopes, grew gigantic blisters that repeatedly burst, and held always in their minds’ eye the vision of their plateau of plenty. Sometimes in descent they had as many cattle behind as they had to the fore, and always the colossus of a reel bumped and rolled, occasionally appearing to be on the point of running away on its own or getting stuck forever. Great pits appeared on its rims as they abraded away, and by the time that they finally rolled it into Cochadebajo de los Gatos they were worn completely and the outer layer of rope was scuffed and filthy. The people took to their hammocks and slept for three days whilst the animals went unsupervised, shaking their withers with an inexpressible feeling of freedom and release. When the town awoke, it was in the certain knowledge that they were a people of conquerors to whom nothing was impossible. They erected the axle-pole in the plaza, and to this day one can see where the ropes ate away their grooves. Every year somebody climbs to the top to nail there a fresh sombrero, and people hold hands with it between them to plight their troth. If they are unlucky they do the same thing later on in order to vanquish infertility.
    Every day Profesor Luis and Misael did a little something towards constructing the machine; there was no point in rushing because improvisation calls for reflection and a great deal of scratching at one’s chin and hairline. It calls for sitting down and smoking cigars whilst awaiting inspiration; it calls for copas in the whorehouse, and it requires fixing one’s eyes on the middle distance and visualising pulleys and gantries. Now and then it required departing with a team of bulls to fetch more telegraph poles, or trunks of mahogany to saw into planks.
    They built a platform with sides that folded out, big enough to take a tractor should they one day acquire one. It was reinforced with hammered strips of steel bolted around the planks, which were in turn bolted into an interlocking lattice of beams.
    Away from the cliffs edge they constructed a vast framework that would angle out over the chasm. The two sides were built first, lying flat on the ground, and then they were hauled by straining teams ofcitizens into upright positions whilst they were joined crosswise by beams of quebracha. Huge notches were cut, holes were burned and drilled, pegs as thick as a child’s thigh were hammered through and lashed with ropes, and then the cage was suspended in place beneath a system of pulleys made out of car wheels. Each pulley had so many wheels that Profesor Luis maintained that even a child could haul the cage up on its own, using only one finger.
    At this point muletrains were despatched to Ipasueño along with Doña Constanza and her chequebook. They returned burdened with sacks of cement, gravel, and sand, and the manager of the mining corporation found himself once more unexpectedly better off. In the meantime Profesor Luis and Misael had finished the lever-operated friction brakes and had dug out of the rock a vast hole in which to set the spindle of the windlass.
    It was a pharaonic spectacle. The whole town turned out to move the immense contraption to its place above the chasm. Teams of workers, stripped to the bare minimum save for those that were naked, hauled and shoved in unison to the beat of the bata drums normally used at the candomble to summon the gods. The machine creaked and swayed as it inched along the rollers, and