The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (9 page)

These people, Schuster thought, sweat running down the back of his neck, could not grasp the notion of a transcendent God. They demanded miracles if they were to believe. Over the years he himself, contemplating flowers, a river, a tree, had come to know how the soul could merge into and become one with the divine. In South America he had heard God’s voice in the jungle, had glimpsed His plan for creation in termite hills, in a jaguar’s eyes, in the Guaraní Indians’ wonder at musical instruments. But for
these
people it was utterly impossible to experience God in a tree, or to trace the kingdom of heaven in a watercourse. All they saw in a tree was timber for a shack. In a river, fish for food. In a cornfield only a loaf of bread. To win them over you had to teach them to read and write, or feed them during crop failures. It was through adaptability and practical work that the Society had won souls for the faith.

Suddenly he gave a start so violent he almost lost his balance. Clearer than ever he heard the ghost-voice.

Henriette
, it said. Just that one word,
Henriette
!

To find a link between what was now happening here in the monastery and what he himself had witnessed half a generation ago at the other end of the world, Julian Schuster had of late more and more frequently returned to the years of his youth. The story had begun shortly after his twelfth birthday when he had joined the Order’s brethren as a novice at Jerez in Spain (then under the Bourbon monarchy). And since he’d been thought to be musical he’d been trained as choirmaster and organ builder by Santiago de Castellón, the famous musician-priest, regarded in his own day by the whole known world as master of the organ. During his novitiate, secretly wearying of the monotony of a monastic life, Schuster had applied to do missionary work, and been sent out on an Indiaman to the Spanish dominions overseas. But he hadn’t sailed alone. Also on board was an organ, dismantled but complete with its stops and stop-heads, ivory keyboards and gilded frontal pipes, a gift from Ferdinand IV to help the brethren win over the souls of the last of the Guaraní warriors.

Never would Schuster forget that May evening when, at the height of the monsoon, he had put into Asunción by riverboat and a drunken oarsman, whose Spanish was so mixed up with the Indian lingo that Schuster could hardly understand a word he said, had ferried him over to the quay. The red-hot breeze. The dust that seemed to make the air glow. The stench from the marshes where liberated slaves lived in huts raised on poles. Vultures and dogs fighting over the waste in the open sewers. Rats dashing in and out between the carriage wheels as he had made his way up to the Jesuit monastery in the company of Father Sepp. Formerly a member of the royal orchestra in Vienna it was he who, with his four decades of missionary experience, was to teach Schuster the trick of using music as a landing-net when catching souls.

Five nights he had stayed in the town while the organ was being shipped over to a smaller riverboat, resting up from a journey that had lasted almost three months, first wafted on by trade-winds across the Atlantic, then by mule caravans until they’d reached Paraguay, God’s own state in the heart of Spanish America.

The experience was unreal. He had never been homesick during the years of his novitiate, but the longing he felt then for the monastery’s ascetic comforts, for the ritual of the hours, for Santiago de Castellón’s diffident lectures on the organ’s harmonics, had been unbearable. Mosquitoes turned his nights into an inferno of itching and scratching. The daytime heat threatened to drive him out of his mind. The stink of carcasses and human corpses and the winds blowing in putrefaction from the marshes took away his appetite. He saw the town, with its fathomless poverty, its sick dying in gutters, its Spaniards the jungle had turned into savages and the Indians’ drummings and ecstatic cries that filled his sleep with nightmares, as a limbo, an antechamber to hell. And when at last Father Sepp and he had boarded the riverboat that was to take them up the Rio Apa to the primaeval forests of the north-east, he was seized by panic that he would never see the Old World again. Everything, the town, the jungle, the people, all was a premonition of the evil fortunes awaiting him at the end of his life.

Those first days, sitting on deck under a canvas awning, they had still seen villages and human life. Rowing boats lay moored by the bridges. Tame armadilloes were tethered to huts. Naked children were at play in the lagoons and had waved to them. But on the fourth day all humankind had suddenly vanished, and during the rest of their upriver voyage the only signs of life had been the caymans sunning themselves on sandbanks, catching butterflies in their wide-open jaws.

Three weeks it had taken them to reach their destination – a missionary station in the province of Conceptión, west of the crumbling mass of the Maracaju Mountains. The settlement consisted of a few timber shacks with roofs made of banana leaves and a church built of rough palmwood, embraced by jungle on three quarters of the compass. By then Schuster had lost ten kilos in body weight, and the humidity had rotted his linen shirts.

Another priest, Father Leander, met them at the pile bridge. Further up the slope, under a colourful canopy, stood a group of Indians, holding what he at first took to be blowpipes. But as the priest led the way up to the mission house the savages had begun playing a piece popular in Europe a few years before, in four-part harmony. What he had taken for blowpipes were in fact flutes. He couldn’t believe his ears. To hear music here, at Christianity’s last outpost, seemed to go against the grain of nature.

That same day the organ had been unloaded, then the riverboat and its crew of twenty-four Indian oarsmen, paid off in brandy, had continued upstream towards Asunción. Apart from a few iron fittings that had been attacked by rust most of the instrument was in good repair. There, in their huge cases, were the
rückpositiv
, the wooden manuals, the soundboards, the
haupt
-,
brust
- and
oberwerk
, the pipes, the pedals and two dozen Italian olivewood windchests which in a fortnight would be sending labial tones echoing out over the jungle to frighten the howlers and silence its parrots’ bellicose arrogance.

At that time Schuster was about to turn twenty. But sitting on the crates containing the Florentine bass-pipes in the shade of the dilapidated chapel, where the naked savages were taking their siesta, arrows laid across their chests, and with the jungle inching forward before his eyes like a huge green huntsman, he realised that his life was nothing he could take for granted. Ten miles inland began the area still controlled by the last of the Guaraní warriors. Three generations had gone by since the first Jesuits had begun tempting these savages out of the jungle. The heads of the Guaranís, who loved music, had been turned by the notes coming from spinets, violins and wind instruments. Some were said to have fallen into a trance at the sound of the Spanish trumpets, and certain tribes had taken the missionaries, who mastered all these instruments, whose sonorities no creature of the jungle could emulate, for gods. With music for bait, and by promising to teach the savages to play these instruments of paradise, the brethren had managed to baptise them and had founded hundreds of model villages along the watercourses. Large areas of jungle had been felled and turned into fertile arable land. Each village came to have its own – often exceptional – Indian orchestra. Further along the Paraguay River the clearings had grown into small towns, all presided over by Jesuit missionaries like Fathers Sepp or Leander, courageous men who feared nothing but their own terror during supernatural thunderstorms. The slave-hunters, so-called Mamelukes, had been forbidden to set foot on missionary soil. In this musical land across the ocean, the ideas of Louis Blanc and Karl Marx, which wouldn’t burgeon in Europe for another hundred years, were already in practice. No private ownership existed in the compounds. All property was held in common.

It had been Schuster’s job to build the huge instrument whose harmonies were to convert the last savage souls to the true faith, and he fell to his task with a dedication inspired as much by his fear of the wilderness as by God. During his second week there, aided by a dozen natives who had turned up in canoes from a compound a day’s journey further downstream – and who handled their machetes as skilfully as they did the instruments they had brought on which to play celestial music in the starry nights, or as skilfully as they caught the parrots they kept in cane cages and sold to German merchants – he cleared a four-kilometre pathway through the jungle up to the high plateau. Their mellifluous singing and their way of decorating their faces with colour from red bark to keep the jungle spirits at bay amazed him. But when he asked them about some savage Indians said to be still living in the district, they merely smiled their enigmatic smiles.

At the end of the pathway a glade was cleared. The heavier sections of the organ that could not be carried without risk of dropping them caused a certain amount of trouble, until Father Sepp suggested they be put back into their boxes and rolled along on logs, using ropes and tackle where the slopes were too steep. It took yet another week to get the parts into place and assembled under Schuster’s supervision, the whole beneath a roof of plaited bast matting. By then the Indians had gone quiet, and their silence as they squatted at the forest fringe whisking away mosquitoes with palm leaves was so foreboding it brought him out in goose pimples.

Here, sheltered somewhere behind a wall of verdure, in an area that for centuries had been a blank spot on the Viceroy’s maps, lived the last of the Guaraní warriors. In Asunción Schuster had heard drunken mestizos talking about savages whose magical tricks bent the minds of even the most hardened soldiers, and about others who preserved human flesh in snake poison and grilled missionaries’ hearts over an open fire, spicing them with chilli fruits. Not that he believed them, except during the night when the jungle filled with ominous noises and jaguars’ eyes gleamed out of vegetation, and the weeping of persons drowned long ago could be heard down by the river.

The day the organ was finished the Indians abruptly vanished: something Schuster could never explain. He turned round, and they were gone, seemingly swallowed up by the jungle. Father Sepp had gone back to Asunción to receive a delegation from the Vatican, and Leander was at the missionary station with two women who had gone down with malaria. All he heard was the squawking of parrots, the insects’ symphony, the eerie knocking sound from the jungle that never ceased swelling and contracting. And it was at that moment, faced with the magnificence of Creation, he sat himself down at the organ and began to play – played for hours on end, tramping wind into the windchests, improvising his way up and down the manuals’ aliquots, mixtures, reeds and flue stops; fugues, chorales, a minuet. He tried to imagine what this strange object might look like to a pair of eyes that from their jungle hideout might never have seen a white man before. Like a strange throne? Or a rumbling monster with a human being on its back, as in the last hours of the Apocalypse? By the time he stopped playing darkness had fallen, and the jungle seemed suddenly emptied of sound.

Schuster fell to his knees and prayed his way through the entire rosary. Then, after committing himself to God’s mercy, after quenching his thirst from a jug of molasses, he had fallen asleep in a hammock strung beween two rubber trees.

When he opened his eyes it was dawn and the howlers were performing their lascivious serenade. He got out of his hammock, before falling to his knees and praying for courage to endure his fear.

At the forest edge, around the organ, a group of naked Guaraní warriors were standing with blowpipes in their hands.

That morning sixty years ago had remained in his mind with a clarity of detail rare in his later memories. Defying his secret homesickness, Schuster had stayed in the jungle for almost fifteen years. Becoming a legend in the Jesuits’ missionary strivings, he founded four thriving compounds, the largest counting three thousand souls. So perfectly had he taught himself the savages’ languages, he’d been appointed editor of the two-volume dictionary put together at the request of the Congregation, in which each word, even from the remotest Indian dialects, had been transcribed and translated into Latin. Only a man of his constitution could have withstood life at this last outpost of Christianity. He survived two cholera epidemics, one bloodthirsty Indian uprising, a severe bout of scurvy, jungle fevers that had lasted for months at a time, four poisonous snake bites and half a year’s enslavement by the Mamelukes after they burned down his last compound and he elected to yield himself up, a captive to the slave-hunters together with the savages he loved as dearly as the children he would never have. When the Brotherhood was gradually forced out of the state to which they’d brought the light, hidden it under a bushel and so painstakingly protected, his grief was all consuming. Power-crazed kings drove them away from their Terra Divina in the depths of the primitive jungle, scotched their attempt to build a new Eden from a fresh shoot of the tree of mankind: create an Adam and Eve of the Indian race.

Schuster felt that somehow there was a link between this boy and the savages. And that was why, this Sunday evening in late summer, having neglected his hourly prayers, he listened anxiously to this strange ghost-voice that had begun haunting him, and was trying to work out what it could be.

His thoughts turned to the boy. The first event that, in popular belief, had been declared a miracle had concerned a shepherd by the name of Dietmar Fromm who maintained he had only to take one look at the boy to learn the whereabouts of a runaway ewe – in a ravine where she’d gone astray while he, neglecting his pastoral duties, had been visiting a girl. The cripple, he asserted, had given him a lucid mental picture of where his runaway sheep was to be found. “It was absolutely clear,” he said. “I stared at the cripple, just wishing to find her, and suddenly I knew everything.”