The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Thank you, Padre. Now may I ask what you are doing fighting? You, a man of God?’

  ‘I want to do some good in the world. And why on earth are you in the army, a cultivated man who likes butterflies and the music of Chavez?’

  At that moment Federico walked in agitatedly. ‘Bring him out Garcia. He is to be tried by the council as an enemy of the people and of civilisation.’

  The General smiled wryly. ‘Let’s go then, Padre. And the answer to your question is the same as your answer to mine.’

  The ornithological General stepped out of the cool darkness of the old grass hut into sunshine that burst on him like a starshell.

  He shielded his eyes against the heat and found himself standing in a seated semicircle of about thirty ruffianly warriors, some of whom examined him with idle interest, and others of whom stared at him with a hatred and malice that seemed to crash into him with an intensity even more stunning and surprising than the tropical sun of the mountains. He turned and caught Garcia’s eye; ‘Also be good to my burra. Her name is Maria.’

  13

  * * *

  THE ONLY WAY TO TURN A CAMPESINO INTO A GUNMAN

  CAMPESINOS DO NOT become guerrillas for the same reasons as middle-class intellectuals from towns. In the case of the latter, the theoretical conviction comes first, and is nourished by the long hours of involved conversation in cafés and student union refectories. Then some of the intellectuals disappear into the countryside, as Hugo Blanco did in Peru, and attempt to organise and politicise the peasantry and the miners in the mountains. Or else, like the poet Javier Heraud or Che Guevara, they throw their lives away in the jungle or the mountains by staging heroic ‘focos’ which never win any territory permanently and which are always crushed because the peasants and defectors give away their positions to the Army.

  Campesinos often speak no Spanish, have no education at all, and live in places where they have been cut off from the rest of the world all their lives. They have no interest in ideas signified by long words, and rarely become guerrillas, because they accept things being the way they are and cannot leave their minifundios for fear of losing a crop or their steers.

  A sizeable proportion of them however work in feudal conditions on giant encomiendas that can take a week or more to cross on horseback. In Bolivia and Peru there have been land reforms, but these have seldom been implemented by local authorities far out in the interior, and they have always been bogged down in a morass of bureaucracy and sharp dealing.

  Some of the encomiendas are run by enlightened and benign patrones who build houses, open schools and clinics, and pay for local policemen; such a one was Don Emmanuel.

  The Carillo brothers were of the other species, however. The Carillos paid their thousands of workers nothing at all, but obliged them to work six days a week in return for allowing a minifundio to each family, of which three-fifths of the produce had to go to the Carillos.

  As if these by no means uncommon conditions of slavery were not enough, the Carillos had a permanent gang of thugs hired to keep the peons in line, and did not readily permit local authorities access to their land. The Carillos freely exercised the jus primae noctis, and raped and brutalised when and where the whim came upon them.

  One day the two brothers raped a young woman, wife of Pedro Arevalo, and then murdered her and left her body in the coca plantation. To forestall Arevalo’s complaints they denounced him to the police for theft, and then returned with the police to arrest him. On the way they stopped for a few drinks, and became so incapacitated that they sent a young boy called Paulo to fetch him. He arrived on his burro, and there ensued a violent altercation in which Pedro Arevalo denounced the Carillo brothers for the rape and murder of his wife, and the Carillo brothers accused him of larceny, and of bearing false witness.

  The police, who, besides being drunk, had no great fondness for the Carillos, returned to their post having sorted out nothing at all, and Pedro and the Carillos returned to their respective homes.

  Pedro Arevalo had two younger brothers, Gonzago and Tomas, who worked beside him on the banana plantation and on his minifundio. They heard talk in the village that the Carillos’ jaguncos were coming to get Pedro the next evening, so in the morning Tomas and Gonzago, with a small band of campesinos, went to the police post to explain that they needed arms to protect Pedro against the Carillos. The three policemen listened sympathetically but said that they could not just hand out weapons. The Sergeant was just about to propose that he and his two men should return with the peasants to protect Pedro Arevalo, when Tomas, impatient and hot-headed as ever, drew his revolver and threatened to shoot if arms were not handed out immediately. Gonzago leapt on his brother and in the ensuing scuffle the Sergeant was accidentally shot in the head. The campesinos then had to tie up the other two policemen to prevent them from arresting Tomas for manslaughter. They took four rifles and some ammunition from the armoury and returned in a band to Pedro Arevalo’s barraca, only to find that they were too late. Pedro was hanging from a caracolee tree, and his hut was in flames.

  Outraged, the band marched on the hacienda and took up positions in the trees around it. When Alberto Carillo appeared in the doorway his gross form presented too easy a target to miss, and a volley of shots sent him sinking to his knees before he fell sprawling down the wooden steps. Jagunco faces immediately appeared in the windows, saw the invasion of campesinos, were shot at, and disappeared.

  There began a long siege of the hacienda. Gonzago cut with his machete the thick black plastic piping that fed water from the water-tower, and also hacked through the power cable from the generator, giving himself a severe electric shock which knocked him off his feet but which had the desired effect of cutting off the air-conditioning.

  As the day grew older and the sun reached its zenith the heat inside the concrete building became unbearably suffocating. A man who came to a window for some fresh air was shot dead in mid-breath. The campesinos waited, snatching brief periods of siesta in the shade of the trees, and the men inside the hacienda became more and more desperate. They drank all the beer that was in the fridge, undid their buttons, mopped their faces with their shirts, and tried to shake the stinging sweat from their eyes. Unable to bear the heat and the fear any more, one man slipped out of the back door and tried to run for it. The peasants waited for him to overrun them, and then hacked him to death with their machetes so that his screams could be clearly heard in the hacienda. Then they strung the body up on a tree where it could be seen.

  The peons watched the house all through the night, firing on two jaguncos as they tried to creep away under cover of darkness. Only one of them was killed; the other lay under a window keening and imploring the Virgin to help, until he died shortly after dawn from the bullet in his bowels.

  At the time of these events Gonzago was nineteen years old and Tomas was eighteen. Their brother Pedro was twenty-two when he died, and his wife was seventeen. The three brothers had lost their mother when they were very young; she had died giving birth to a little girl who would have been their sister, and the boys were looked after by their father and a network of aunts. There was no school for them to go to, but they were taught to read by an aunt who herself had been taught by nuns from a convent which the Carillo brothers had ‘bought’ to convert into warehouses. Their father had died when Pedro was fifteen in an accident involving the felling of timber in the southern forest of the encomienda, and since then they had worked for the Carillos and also on their minifundio, cultivating manioc for making chicha, and maize, pigs, lemons and chickens.

  Their clothes were always ragged and crudely patched, but the boys were renowned for their pranks, their good looks, and their ability to break in horses. It was reckoned that an Arevalo boy could subdue a wild stallion in half the time that it took anyone else, so much of their time was spent taming horses and mules for local people, or the Carillos, usually being paid in chickens or cuts of meat.

  Pedro was a stocky man with p
owerful shoulders and a droll way with words. He knew many jokes mostly involving animals, and although he knew only one melody, he was able to extemporise new verses to it indefinitely, many of them either bawdy or sacrilegious. He had won the heart of Rosalita mainly by making her laugh, but also by reciting love poems to her that he made up on the spot.

  Gonzago and Tomas looked so much alike that Gonzago grew a Zapata moustache so that people could distinguish them. They were both slightly built, with striking dark eyes and eyebrows that met in the middle. Both had disarmingly charming grins that one usually describes as ‘boyish’ and both of them had thick black hair that proved that there was a little Indian in their ancestry. Gonzago was particularly proud of his one gold tooth that sparkled when he smiled and which had been painfully installed by an itinerant cholo dentist. The boys had a distinctive Mexican look about them that contrasted with the mestizo appearance of most of their neighbours, and made them favourites with the local girls, who taught them the art of wanton glances when they were still very young. They were, however, a little different in temperament, as Tomas was quicktempered and volatile, while Gonzago was easygoing and an avoider of argument. Tomas liked chewing coca, and Gonzago preferred to smoke marijuana, which grew freely in the countryside, and that, perhaps, points most assuredly to the differences in their personalities.

  Neither of them, however, would ever have dreamed that they would one day be part of a lynching party that would ring the hacienda of the most powerful landowners in the province. The hacienda occupied several hectares of its own grounds. It was a long, low, one-storey building that enclosed a rectangular courtyard in which there were fountains, peacocks, and reproductions of classical statuary. In addition, there was a separate stable block, and, nearby, a large swimming pool in the kind of abstract shape popular in the United States, where the Carillos spent at least a quarter of every year, mostly in Florida and California. In a long field near to the house was a hangar with their two-engined executive aeroplane in it and a huge Cadillac that was virtually useless on the rough local terrain, especially in the rainy season.

  As morning broke, the remaining Carillo brother, Peralta, and the ten remaining jaguncos decided to attempt to shoot their way out and make a dash for the aeroplane. The eastern horizon was just beginning to break up into yellow and orange streaks when a door burst open and the eleven sprinted towards the hangar.

  Caught unawares, the campesinos were slow to respond. Gonzago shouted, started firing at the running men, and soon all of them were firing as rapidly as they could. They dropped six of the jaguncos, and Peralta Carillo, who on account of grossness equal only to his brother’s was lagging behind, was hit in the leg and toppled headlong. He was the only one who knew how to fly the aeroplane, so the remaining four men leapt into the Cadillac. One of these men was the Carillo’s chauffeur, and he was able to produce the keys, and start the engine. He brought the car, bouncing wildly on its springs, across the field, onto the lawn, and to the head of the drive. One of the peons put a blast from his shotgun through the windscreen and the car careered off the drive and juddered into a tree. The campesinos rushed the car, dragged out the stunned thugs, and beat them to death with their rifle butts without even uttering a curse.

  This done, they stood for a minute looking with some little horror at what they had done, and then walked back to the hacienda. There was an ill-judged whimper from the prostrate Peralta Carillo. If he had not cried out there might have been a chance for him to escape, but as it was he soon found himself being dragged across the lawns to the trees, alternately screaming threats and pleading for his life.

  The campesinos let down the jagunco they had hanged, and hauled up Peralta in his place. The fat and doomed feudal lord, his face turning blue and frothing at the mouth, struggled and flailed wildly on the rope, his eyes rolling and his tongue protruding. He tried to reach above his head to grasp the rope and release a little its tightening grip, but one of the old peasants slashed deftly across his bulging stomach with a machete, and his distended entrails heaved quivering to the ground. They stood, their hands and knees shaking, and watched their former master die like a bullock on a meathook.

  They went into the hacienda and emptied it entirely of its contents, which they left on the lawns for whoever might claim them. One by one they looted the expensively appointed rooms, and smashed anything they considered useless. Then they set fire to the buildings and stood outside watching the flames licking the air, sending up sparks high into the sky. They stayed there until the evening, when the roof had fallen in and there was nothing left but charred timbers and the gutted concrete walls. They left the peacocks to fend for themselves as best they could, and dispersed to their homes in silence, leaving the bodies to the vultures and flies. The next morning the population of the nearest village arrived to squabble over the spoils and spit on the bodies of the Carillos.

  The two police officers unfortunately knew exactly who Tomas and Gonzago were, as Tomas had broken in a mare for one of them a year before. When a passing campesino untied them the next day they went straight to the Arevalo barraca and found it burnt down, with the body of Pedro hanging from the tree. They waited for Tomas and Gonzago to return, and whilst they did so they unstrung the body of Pedro and laid it on the ground so that they could keep the vultures and the ants away.

  The two brothers came down the track and stopped dead when they saw the two policemen. ‘Ola,’ said Gonzago warily.

  ‘Salud,’ replied the older of the two officers, whose name was Fulgencio Vichada. ‘I see you have come to give us our weapons back.’

  Tomas gestured to the body of his brother and the burnt hut. ‘Now you see why we needed them and why you should have given them to us. Look!’

  Fulgencio sighed. ‘I am very sorry about all this,’ he said. He removed his cap and scratched his head. ‘Listen, I have to arrest you for the manslaughter of the Sergeant, for taking the weapons, and for tying us up without our permission.’

  ‘We have killed the Carillos and their pet monkeys as well,’ said Gonzago. ‘You can arrest us for that too.’

  ‘Both of them? All of them?’ asked Fulgencio. ‘On your own?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tomas. ‘We alone.’

  ‘Naturally I will have to arrest you for that too, when my investigations have proved that you were responsible.’ Fulgencio smiled and shook their hands. ‘Goodbye Tomasito, goodbye Gonzago, and buena suerte, eh? My investigations will take three days, so you had better leave as soon as possible, OK?’

  ‘Thank you Fulgencio,’ said Gonzago, unleashing his flashing grin. ‘I suppose you want these guns as well, no?’

  ‘Keep them,’ said Fulgencio, with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘As I said, my investigations will take three days, and we have plenty of them.’

  The four men buried the body of Pedro next to that of Rosalita, and then the policemen gave the two brothers a lift in the jeep to the highway, fifty kilometres away. They embraced, and then the brothers took lorries all the way to the temporarily independent Republic of the 26th of September, where they fell in with Remedios’ faction of the People’s Vanguard and continued the struggle they had commenced far away at home, becoming guerrillas for the only reasons that campesinos ever become guerrillas; personal ones.

  The peasants of the Hacienda Carillo divided up the huge encomienda between themselves, or to be more accurate, they continued to farm their own minifundios and treated the encomienda as common land, introducing fish into the swimming pool. Months later the paramilitary police arrived to keep them off it, but they did not care because they no longer had to give any of their produce away and were much richer for less work, despite knowing nothing about the forces of the market. They never grew the right quantities of anything at the right time, but they were happy subsisting as they were, trading locally.

  No one would buy the Carillo ranch for fear of suffering the same fate, and eventually the police left, leaving it to revert to scrub and
jungle, to be used as common land, and to be the only place in the country where there was a colony of wild peacocks.

  14

  * * *

  PARLANCHINA GOES TO HER WEDDING

  AURELIO HAD A severe toothache so he stuck his knife into the ground and prayed to the angels, knowing that in this way he would be cured by sunset.

  Like most Indians he was short and strong. His face was flat and his beard wispy, and he still dressed like his ancestors, with the distinctive ‘trenza’, the long queue that makes Aymaras look like displaced Chinamen. In a gourd he pounded coca leaves mixed up with snail shells, so that most of the time he was energetic and happy from the effects of sucking the pestle, which bulged in his cheek like a lollipop.

  Aurelio had become a prodigious breeder of dogs; he had heard once that the Maya Indians of Mexico had had dogs which did not bark, and he had made it his life’s obsession to recreate this species for himself. Aymara is famous for being the most logical language in the world, with a syntax and grammar to fill with joy the heart of the most arid computer. But the logic of his language had failed to make Aurelio himself a rational man. Perhaps he wished to breed barkless dogs out of a sense of solidarity with that long-vanished civilisation, or perhaps it was because he knew somehow that all men need an obsession to bring meaning and purpose to their lives, and, for this, one obsession is as good as another.

  Aurelio’s acquaintances all knew that he would pay good money for a quiet dog, even though he was not a rich man, and some people with no principles even trained their dogs not to bark so that he would buy them for breeding. This deceit, once he had become wise to it, caused Aurelio to grow sceptical about the general trustworthiness of mankind. Even to his wife he would say, ‘I trust my dogs more than you, even though I love you more.’