Unholy Crusade Page 11

  On leaving the restaurant they found that quite a strong wind had risen, creating a minor dust-storm. Each gust lifted little clouds of sand from the ground and blew it most unpleasantly into their faces. As they walked towards the car park, Adam commented that they were lucky it had not been like that in the morning during their long walk round.

  Chela agreed, then added, ‘But this is nothing to what we sometimes have to put up with in the spring. Such a great part of the land is barren and dried up that the high winds collect huge clouds of dust which blow right into Mexico City. Everyone who can afford to leaves the capital and goes down either to Cuernavaca or Acapulco. That reminds me. We usually go down to our house at Cuernavaca at week-ends and father wished me to ask you if you would like to come down with us on Friday.’

  Adam happily accepted, then they got into the car and wound up all the windows.

  When they had covered only a few miles on the way back, Chela turned off the smooth, broad motorway on to a bumpy gravel side road that was full of potholes. Ten minutes later they entered a small town and, as she pulled up in the little plaza, she said:

  ‘You have been to some of our luxury restaurants in Mexico City, seen the lovely homes out at Pedregal and one of the housing estates for the favoured white-collar workers; now I want to show you the wretched state in which our rotten government still leaves by far the greater part of the people to live.’

  She made no move to get out of the car and they sat in it for a quarter of an hour while Adam took in the scene.

  The plaster was peeling from the houses round the square, few of them had windows and the roofs of several were either broken or unskilfully patched. A few bedraggled palm trees threw patches of shade on broken paving and a rusty iron rail. Evidently it was market day, as there were many people about, some leading cows so emaciated that their ribs showed through their hides, others carrying several undersized chickens by a string tied round their legs. There were a few battered cars of ancient vintage, loaded to the roof with fruit and vegetables, but most of the traffic consisted of rickety carts drawn by painfully thin mules or, quite often, a sweating peasant. The people were scantily clad, the colour in the women’s dresses long since faded, the once-white cotton suits of the men grey with grime, their straw hats frayed and sometimes brimless. Many of them were in rags and the younger children playing in the dirty gutters were naked.

  In the centre of the square there was a statue that had lost an arm. Below it there was a single water faucet at which a small queue was waiting to fill battered two-gallon jerry cans. It was composed mostly of children and Adam saw one little boy who could not have been more than seven stagger away with his filled can on his back, supported by a piece of rope that crossed his forehead, his eyes starting from his head.

  ‘Poor little devil!’ Adam exclaimed. ‘It’s terrible. After seeing Mexico City I would never have believed it.’

  Chela gave a bitter laugh. ‘I could take you to scores—no, hundreds and hundreds—of little towns and villages like this. And do you know what they live on? Tortillas and a few vegetables and fruits. They are lucky if they see meat once a month. It’s tortillas for breakfast, tortillas for dinner and tortillas for supper. And they haven’t even got mills to grind the maize. The men go out to work in the fields while the women pound the maize with a pestle and mortar; then, as they have no electricity or gas or wood, they have to blow their lungs out fanning into flame a miserable little heap of charcoal on which to cook it. Three times a day they do that, and it takes up most of their waking hours. Can you wonder that there are Communists?’

  Adam gave her a questioning look. ‘From the way you speak, one might imagine that you are one.’

  Opening the door of the car, she replied cryptically, ‘Christ was a Communist, wasn’t He? Come on, let’s go to see the church.’

  They walked a short way down the dusty road on one side of which there was a line of stalls selling cheap cotton garments, luridly-coloured soft drinks, piles of dangerous-looking, home-made sweets and preserved fruits, upon which hordes of flies were feasting.

  The church was a fairly large one. Adam was surprised to find it crowded, and that there were as many men as women in it. It was very old and the interior a strange contrast of the beautiful and ugly. The ceiling was a gem of intricate carving, although most of the gold that must once have made it dazzling had flaked away. There was a row of saints in niches, some of which were works of art and one, he saw with interest, was black, with the features of an Indian. In contrast, grouped round the altar, there were other, smaller, modern figures of saints: cheap, gaudy and with garishly-coloured robes. But before all of them were pyramids of thin, lighted candles, which were constantly being-added to by the poverty-stricken worshippers, paying a peso or two for them out of their hard-won earnings.

  Chela made her genuflection, then knelt in silent prayer. While she was doing so, Adam saw that people were queueing up in front of the altar and he was quite touched to see a peasant, evidently the father of two small boys, who made them kneel beside him, then sprinkled their heads with Holy Water.

  To Adam’s surprise Chela remained on her knees for a good ten minutes. As they left the church, he said, ‘I had no idea you were so devout. In people who lead the sort of life you do, that is unusual in these days.’

  ‘It so happens that I am deeply religious,’ she replied seriously. ‘But even if I weren’t, I should give all the support I could to the Church, because it is the only body that strives to better the lot of our down-trodden peasantry.’

  In his youth, having been brought up as a Presbyterian, Adam had often heard it said that Catholic priests battened on their flocks and extorted the last sou from them to build grandiose churches or send as tribute to the Pope; so he remarked a shade cynically, ‘That may be so here, but in Catholic countries in Europe the Church hasn’t a record it can be very proud of. For centuries it has deliberately kept its followers in ignorance and played on their superstitions to wring money from them.’

  ‘That is not true,’ she retorted sharply. ‘Religion is a very necessary discipline. Its acceptance prevents the break-up of families and enables people to resist many temptations from which, if they gave way to them, crimes would result. The teachings of the Church are based upon a combination of divine revelations and immensely long experience. Therefore, to allow them to be questioned is not for the common good. As for the money side of it, the poor have few pleasures and one of them is attending the great feasts of the Church. Their impressive pageantry must be paid for and the people make their contributions willingly. Anyhow, in Mexico, ever since the Conquest the Church has done nothing but good.’

  ‘How about the Inquisition? You must have had that here.’

  ‘For a time there were auto-da-fè, just as there were in Spain, but on nothing like so great a scale. Its only victims in the New World were Portuguese Jews and other European heretics. The Indians benefited so greatly under the rule of the Fathers that the vast majority of them accepted Christianity willingly, made it the focus of their lives and became, in their own way, very devout. Mentally, though, they were and are like children and not fully responsible; so the Church decreed that the Inquisition should not apply to them.’

  ‘I find it surprising that the Indians should have given up their old gods so readily.’

  ‘Well …’ Chela hesitated. ‘They didn’t exactly. The Church was clever about that. Just as happened in Europe hundreds of years earlier, it allowed its pagan converts to identify the more beneficent of their gods with Christian saints. That is why you often see statues of saints with Indian features and brown faces in the churches here. But there is no harm in that since their devotees practise the Christian religion.’

  By half past three they were back in the city. Chela dropped Adam at his hotel and that evening took him to a party given by one of her friends. There he saw unmistakably that he was by no means the only pebble on her beach. Two good-looking Mexicans and a
n American pursued her with unflagging ardour and she flirted outrageously with all three of them. Adam cut in whenever he could, but they were older friends of hers than he was, and he could not help wondering whether she was having a serious affaire with one or other of them. He tried not to show his jealousy, but doubted if he succeeded.

  At this party he met a couple who invited him to one they were giving the following night and, on learning that Chela was going to it, he happily accepted. The following day he did not see her until the evening; so he spent the time visiting the Cathedral and the Museum of History.

  On the Friday morning Chela called for him again and they set off for Cuernavaca. It lay some thirty miles away and the road took them up into the highlands south of Mexico City. They climbed to ten thousand feet through grasslands and, even at that height, occasional woods of pine and casuarina trees; then they descended the steep slope to five thousand feet and entered the city.

  It, too, was on a steep slope and very different from the capital. There were few big modern buildings, the streets were narrow and the houses mostly very old. That of the Enriquezes was near the castle-like residence that Cortés had had built and lived in during his declining years. From the street the house appeared tall, narrow and by no means impressive; but it had great depth, with fine, lofty rooms inside, the furnishings of which contrasted strongly with those of the penthouse in the Avenida Presidente Masarik. Here there were Old Masters and fine tapestries on the time-darkened wood-panelled walls, Indian woven mats on the polished floors, chairs, tables and commodes that had belonged to Spanish hidalgos long since dead; so that Adam felt as though he had entered the house of a nobleman living in an earlier century.

  Alongside the house and beyond it there was a charming garden with a large, irregular-shaped swimming pool, across a narrow neck of which was a broad wooden bridge supporting a summer-house. As it was a lovely day, they decided to refresh themselves with a swim; so they changed into bathing things at once and, for the first time, Adam saw Chela almost naked. Never, he decided, had he seen a girl with a more beautiful figure and, from the way she narrowed her eyes slightly as she looked at him, he inwardly rejoiced at the thought that, almost certainly, she was admiring his own splendid proportions.

  After their swim they sunbathed for a while, then, still in their bathing things, lunched under an awning in the garden. It was then time for the siesta, although Adam begrudged the hours that he would be deprived of the sight of the lovely Mexican girl who had so swiftly become his divinity.

  At five o’clock they met again downstairs and soon afterwards four other week-end guests arrived, all young people who were friends of Chela’s. The introductions were barely over when her father joined them. With him he brought a handsome, well-set-up man with dark, wavy hair and lustrous brown eyes, who looked to be about thirty. He had a strong likeness to Bernadino Enriquez, and Adam was not surprised when it transpired that he was Chela’s half-brother.

  On seeing him she exclaimed, ‘Why, Ramón, what are you doing here? Why have you left Washington?’

  Laughing, he kissed her. ‘I got in on this morning’s plane. A big deal connected with plastics is being negotiated with the United States government, and our Ambassador thought it would be a good idea to send me down to discuss it with father.’

  ‘I should have thought the United States have enough plastics of their own,’ she remarked.

  ‘Oh, it’s not a deal in that sense,’ he replied lightly. ‘It’s a matter of exchanging information on certain secret processes.’

  After they had had drinks under the awning where Adam and Chela had lunched, all of them except Ramón and his father went up to change into bathing things. When they came out of the house Adam saw that father and son had settled themselves in the summer-house on the bridge over the neck of the pool and were in earnest conversation. But he gave them only a glance, as his eyes were all for Chela.

  For a while the six young people dived, laughed and plunged about in the broader end of the pool then, after a long swim under water, Adam surfaced to find that Chela had disappeared. Momentarily he was seized with an awful fear that she had perhaps dived in where it was too shallow, hit her head on the bottom, knocked herself out and failed to come up. Grabbing the diving board from below, he pulled himself out of the water, threw a leg over the board and swung himself up on to it. From there he could see the whole of that end of the pool. It was lined with blue tiles and the water was clear, but Chela was nowhere to be seen.

  He realised then that she must have swum away under the bridge to the far end of the pool. Diving in, he set off after her. A minute later his swift crawl brought him under the bridge and there she was, her back turned to him, not floating or treading water, but hanging with both hands to one of the cross-beams supporting the low bridge. Her face was turned upward and she appeared to be listening intently.

  At the sound of his approach she swung round, let go with one hand, frowned at him and gestured him to remain silent. Catching at another cross-beam he hung there a few feet away from her.

  As the water he had churned up ceased to swish, he caught the sound of voices coming down through the floorboards of the summer-house. He could not hear all that was said but enough to get the gist of the conversation. The Mexican Ambassador in Washington had been tipped off by the F.B.I. that a revolution was brewing in his country. As security man at the Embassy, Ramón had been sent back to alert his government; but he had come first to inform his father, who was greatly worried at this news and very glad of the warning, as it would enable him to put certain people on guard against possible trouble.

  After a few minutes Chela let go her hold on the beam, slid under water and swam away to the narrow end of the pool. Adam promptly followed and they surfaced face to face some fifteen feet on the far side of the bridge.

  When she had shaken the water from her face, her wide mouth opened in its dazzling smile and she said, ‘Wicked of me to eavesdrop, wasn’t it? But I love learning other people’s secrets, and as Ramón has nothing to do with commerce, I felt certain his unexpected return was not connected with plastics.’

  Adam grinned at her a little awkwardly. ‘Well, as I eavesdropped too, we are birds of a feather. Do you think it likely, though? I mean, the possibility of there being a revolution?’

  She shrugged her splendid shoulders. ‘I doubt it. There are plenty of people both rich and poor who would like to see the present government overthrown and some of them are indiscreet enough to say so. But talk is one thing and action quite another. I shouldn’t think this is more than a baseless rumour that some eager-beaver American agent has picked up. Best forget it. Come on. I’ll race you back to the other end of the pool.’

  As she struck out, Adam gave her a good start, caught her up, then took things easily, gallantly letting her win by a head and shoulders.

  When they had all dried themselves and were drinking their first cocktail, a visitor was brought out of the house. He was an elderly, thickset man, with long, lank, silver hair that turned up at the ends, strangely contrasting bushy black eyebrows beneath which were a pair of curiously dead-looking black eyes. His sallow complexion and hooked nose suggested a dash of Indian blood, although he had the haughty look of a pure-bred Spaniard. He was dressed in a dark suit of gabardine. Bernadino and Ramón were still in the summer-house but the others all stood up as the visitor approached and greeted him with deference. It was not until Chela introduced him as Monsignor Don Alberuque that Adam realised that he was a prelate.

  As Adam met the glance of those cold, fish-like eyes, he felt certain that he had looked into them—or a pair extraordinarily like them somewhere before; but he could not remember where. He was, too, suddenly conscious of an instinctive feeling of mingled fear and hatred of their owner, although the Monsignor gave him no grounds whatsoever for such a reaction. On the contrary, he could not have been more polite and charming as he questioned Adam about his impressions of Mexico and offered to do anythin
g in his power to make his stay more enjoyable.

  He had a deep, sonorous voice, a ready smile and an agile mind. Tactfully he drew one after the other in the little circle into the conversation, asking after their parents and their recent doings. He drank his martinis with evident enjoyment and, without any trace of the coy wickedness adopted by some priests, conveyed the impression that he was a broad-minded man of the world.

  Some quarter of an hour after he had joined them he said to Chela, ‘My daughter, I feel sure your friends will forgive me if I deprive them of you for a few minutes, so that we may have a short private conversation.’

  As she stood up he added with a smile to the others, ‘Dear Chela is invaluable to me in my work, and I called to solicit her aid in smoothing out an unhappy dissension between two members on the committee of one of our many charities.’ Then he took her by the arm and led her away towards the other end of the garden.

  By then dusk was falling, so the others finished their drinks and went up to change for dinner.

  They assembled again at half past eight, the men in dinner jackets, the girls in long dresses as fashionable as any that could have been seen in Paris. Another hour of drinks and laughing chatter followed, during which Don Alberuque rejoined them. Then, an hour earlier than they would have done in the capital, they went in to dine.

  The meal was of six courses, all carefully chosen, and better, Adam thought, than could have been got in most expensive restaurants. The wines had been shipped from Europe: a Manzanilla with the soup, a Montrâchet with the fish, a château-bottled Lafitte with the roast, champagne with the sweet and a Beerenauslese hock to finish up with. Again there came into Adam’s mind the little boy staggering under the weight of the jerry-can of water, and the appalling contrast with this feast which, he felt sure, had not been put on simply for him but was an everyday occurrence in this millionaire’s household.