Read Online The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Louis De Bernières - Free Book Online

the plain below them, already green with the encroachment of nature, but its trees shattered to matchsticks, Misael was elated with his plan and Profesor Luis was inebriated by its grandeur. ‘It will be our estancia, our latifundo, it will be the best farm in the world.’
    Profesor Luis shaded his eyes with his hand and squinnied against the light. ‘We will grow everything,’ he said, ‘We will grow rice in the damp parts, we will grow avocados and bananas, we will grow cattle where the land is fallow, we will drown in milk and cheese, we will flounder in an orgy of oranges.’
    ‘Maybe so,’ replied Misael, who was suspicious of poetry on all occasions except for this, ‘but you will have to construct a machine to help us up and down. It will be the biggest machine of your life, it will be a machine to make your windmills toys.’
    ‘I will make a machine,’ said Profesor Luis, ‘such as has never been seen.’ And he went away and lay down in the dark for two days with a blanket over his head until the germ of the machine wafted in on the mountain wind, settled in the silt of his imagination, broke its carapace with the force of its first sprout, developed tap roots and hair roots, budded with branches and the intimate details of flowers, and turned into a machine more magnificent than the system of the heavens. Profesor Luis went to eat picante de pollo in Dolores’ restaurant, wiped his mouth, sat back, and mentally prepared his exposition of the machine to the natural leaders of Cochadebajo de los Gatos.
    ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth,’ he proclaimed grandiloquently, but the first great feat of Archimedean leverage to be performed was not the gathering of wherewithals, but the persuasionof the people to undertake the colossal task in the first place. It seemed crazy to almost everyone that when they were still digging out the city, still remaking roofs, and scratching for food, someone should propose the diversion of labour into the construction of a giant lift.
    ‘You are more loco than Father Garcia,’ said Josef, his speech a little indistinct on account of the wad of coca in his cheek.
    ‘It is a wonderful idea,’ said Father Garcia with an expansive gesture, ‘we could have it raised and lowered metaphysically with the aid of angels. If I could be sure of the infallibility of levitation, I would operate it myself.’
    ‘We have too much else to do,’ said Remedios, ‘and if you think about it, we have just emigrated from the plain. Why should we want to go back down to it when here we are safe?’
    ‘But it is not the plain, Remedios, it is a plateau, and it is better for agriculture than the plain ever was.’
    ‘To me,’ said Remedios, ‘it is the plain,’ and she went back to cleaning her Kalashnikov and keeping an eye on the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, who was nostalgically drawing a diagram of a Landsknecht sword in the dust of the floor.
    ‘Bugger that,’ exclaimed Don Emmanuel when Profesor Luis outlined his plan, ‘I am already more worn out with labour than a Panamanian whore. This is a scheme for lazy times. Look how my belly has shrunk from digging the andenes.’
    Profesor Luis scrutinised the proffered belly, tight as a drum and decorated with ginger hairs. ‘You exaggerate, Don Emmanuel,’ he said.
    Hectoro puffed hard on his puro, squinting against the smoke and patting his horse’s neck. ‘Will I be able to descend on horseback?’ he enquired.
    ‘Undoubtedly,’ replied Profesor Luis.
    ‘Then maybe and maybe not,’ said Hectoro, who believed that the fewer words a man said, the more of a man he was, and the more of a man he was, the less he got off his horse.
    It was true that Misael was in favour of the plan, since it had been his idea, but even he was now a little less enthusiastic about it because he had had several nightmares in which people hurtled to their deaths in a large wooden cage, and he was worried that it was a