The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘But,’ she said, in between sobs, ‘I don’t know anything!’

  He kneeled down and turned her over. Her mascara had run down her face with her tears. He tore open her shirt and pulled her brassière above her breasts. ‘You had better tell me,’ he said, as he kneaded them with his hands.

  ‘Oh God,’ she moaned in despair, and she lay there sobbing helplessly as he unzipped her jeans and pulled them off, and then her underwear. She lay motionless and continued to weep as he raped her.

  From then on the Colonel raped nearly all the women who came through his office, especially the young and pretty ones, and then he locked them up. Sometimes he raped the prettiest ones several times before leaving them to his workforce, who had all developed the same habits as himself. The Colonel did not care any more. He had complete power. He knew he could do anything at all.

  The Colonel got into the routine of beating up all his prisoners. They told him lies first for the sake of having something to tell him, but he did not care any more about that either. He just arrested those implicated and beat them up too. He discovered that people have a particular horror of having their faces disfigured, especially girls, and he began to keep a poker permanently stuck into the gas-fire. He learned that the prisoners referred to him as ‘Asado’ – it means ‘angry’ and it also means ‘barbecue’. The name gave him grim satisfaction, and he did not mind when his colleagues addressed him by it. On the lips of the prisoners it bespoke his power, and on the lips of his colleagues it bespoke ease and familiarity. His three comrades were already known as ‘El Electricista’, who like to question people with the aid of a cattle prod, ‘El Verdugo’ (the hangman), who employed the strappado, and ‘El Bano’, who liked to drown people.

  It was impossible to send all the people home after their treatment, and so the ones who did not die under torture were usually shot through the vertebrae of the neck, as it was not too messy. Eventually the sports field of the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers would not contain any more bodies, and so the Colonel began to explore alternatives. He had a crematorium built, and he had some bodies dumped at cemeteries, where they were buried as ‘Non Nombre’. He commandeered an Army Transport Plane and dumped bodies over the jungle, where their deaths were blamed on terrorists – these were known as ‘free-falls’. Some he had dumped out to sea, but he stopped this when the tide brought them into holiday resorts in embarrassing numbers.

  Very soon the newspapers were full of stories about people being abducted by armed thugs in Ford Falcons, people who disappeared and were never seen again. Relatives began to deliver habeas corpus writs to the police, who were confused by the whole thing. ‘We cannot honour your writs,’ they would say, ‘as we have no records of ever having arrested them.’ Colonel Asado put a stop to all this by arresting any journalist who reported the disappearances, and any relatives who kicked up a fuss. They soon got the message, especially when the Navy and the Air Force got in on the game as well. A silent terror descended upon the capital city of the nation.

  Colonel Asado opened four more centres and had sixty people working for him. He grew very rich by selling the possessions of those who vanished, by discovering that General Ramirez never bothered to check through the invoices that he sent him, and by accepting money, before he killed them, from those who attempted to buy their freedom.

  27

  * * *

  OF CURES, CATS, AND LAUGHTER

  La Estancia

  Ma chère Maman,

  I have so much news, Maman, since I last wrote, that I scarcely know where to begin! I do hope that my last letter did not depress you too much; I was myself formidably depressed at the time, but things have much improved since then, mostly because I now have some hope for Françoise.

  Do you remember that I mentioned a brujo (a sort of sorcerer) called Pedro? Some people call him ‘El Legatero’ because he knows how to catch alligators alive. You may remember that he told Françoise to eat raw coral snakes for her cancer, but she refused to eat more than one, and her remission went into reverse.

  Well, he came back a few days ago and told me that he and an Indian were holding a special healing session in the village where he comes from, and he invited us to come along. He said, ‘You should both come because the Senora’s illness is half because of you.’ I was very puzzled, and did not know whether to be insulted or whether to find this ridiculous. However, I did not dare to say anything because the man was very serious, and has a kind of mystique about him that is positively awesome. He is very tall and lean, with muscles on his arms like a Foreign Legion physical training instructor, and he dresses in clothes he makes himself from the animals he catches. He once caught a rogue jaguar for Don Pedro (the man with the aeroplane) and shot it through the eye to stop the skin being damaged. How anyone could shoot so well with an old musket, I cannot understand. Anyway, he is very grizzled and dignified, and I confess that his invitation seemed more like an order.

  Françoise was very weak and tired, and I nearly did not take her on the night concerned. But in the end we drove fifteen kilometres to the village over the most appalling dirt tracks, and when we arrived I found it in a state of siege, except without any besiegers. There were ramparts across the street, draped with barbed wire, and everyone, even the women and children, were armed to the teeth. I asked a woman what was going on and she said, ‘We are waiting for the soldiers.’ I asked her if they were communist revolutionaries or something, and she looked at me as if I were mad and burst out laughing. But at least she showed me the way to the healing session.

  It was in an awful dingy little choza (the kind of hut you see in the Andes), and when we went in I could not see anything at first except the fire burning in the middle. A voice said, ‘Sit down,’ and I realised it was Pedro, the sorcerer. He was naked except for a loin cloth, and he looked very sinister with his face half in shadows and the flames glowing red on his body. He said, ‘Have you eaten no meat, no sugar, and no salt?’ and I said, ‘No, we have not.’

  He told us to tell him about our illnesses and the woman next to me said that she was a prostitute (forgive me for mentioning such a thing) and that in plying her trade she had developed a bad back. She said her name was Dolores. Then there was a man called Misael, who looked a bit like Pedro, tall and muscly, and about the same age. He said he was there instead of his baby son who had terrible burn scars. I thought this was a little strange, but everyone seemed to take it as normal that you could be healed on someone else’s behalf. There was an Indian who said his name was Aurelio, a very strange-looking character, with a mongoloid face, a long queue of hair, and very short and stocky. He said he was there to help Pedro with the spirits. He kept having bits of conversation with someone completely invisible to the rest of us, whom he addressed as ‘Gwubba’. I thought he was probably half-mad, if not completely so.

  Pedro and the Indian both lit huge cigars, and then filled a gourd with stuff they call ‘ayahuasca’; I think it is a Quechua word, but I do not know what it means. They made each one of us drink a whole gourdful while Pedro chanted and the Indian rattled a rattlesnake’s rattle. The tea tasted very foul, and I nearly choked; it was greasy and bitter and bit at the back of the throat.

  We sat there for about an hour whilst they chanted and rattled, and suddenly Aurelio said, ‘The spirits are here.’ At exactly that moment I began to feel very nauseous, and so did Françoise. My heart was racing and I was suddenly completely disorientated. I could not sit upright any more because I could not tell which was the floor or the roof or the walls. I could not see anything either, because stripes and blobs of bright colours, especially blue, kept floating across my eyes and big balls of fluffy purple light were shooting towards me and then shooting away. At one second the walls of the hut were so close that I could not breathe, and the next they were kilometres away so that I felt as small as an ant. I was pouring with perspiration, and my lungs would not co-operate.

  Then I found myself back at hom
e sitting under the bougainvilleas, admiring the moon, then I was back in France as a child, trying to pick a fig that was too high up for me to reach, and then I was back in the hut, but I could not see the others. I tried to crawl around to find them, but the floor kept tilting so that I just slid around, and at one point everything turned upside-down so that I was crawling on the ceiling. But I felt so heavy that I could barely move at all, and when I cried ‘au secours’ I emitted only a strangled yelp.

  Eventually everything calmed down, and there they were, still chanting and rattling. I was just thinking, ‘Thank God it is over,’ when they began to turn into animals. They were oxes, llamas, vizcachas, jaguars, ocelots, toucans, and caimans, and they swapped from one to the other with such rapidity and suddenness that I forgot my alarm and watched with a kind of hypnotised fascination. At one point I saw a beautiful young girl with hair down to her waist, standing behind the Indian with her hands on his shoulders.

  When that was all over, Pedro moved over to Françoise, who was flat on her back. He opened her shirt and exposed her breasts, a sight so gruesome that I cannot bear to think of it. Pedro took the flesh of one breast into his mouth and sucked very hard on it. Then he came away and started to salivate into the fire. Believe me, Maman, his saliva turned into a scorpion that landed in the embers, scuttled about, and then shrivelled into ashes. He repeated this procedure on the other breast, and spat, of all things, a snake a metre long into the fire, where it writhed as it burned away. Then he came to me and sucked cactus spines out of my belly!

  At that point I passed out, and when I woke up, Aurelio and Pedro were starting the whole thing again, and we had to drink more ayahuasca. I was reeling from the effects when I realised that I could see everything out of the back of my head. I actually turned away from them in order to watch. Then Aurelio said something to me with a voice so deep and macabre that I fainted from terror, and did not wake up again until morning, with my mouth feeling like an old boot filled up with Parmesan cheese.

  Everyone else was already awake, and Pedro said, ‘Will you take a copa?’ and he gave me a little cup of chacta, which is very powerful. It burned a hole in my stomach, but I instantly felt better. I said to Pedro, ‘So was my wife’s cancer natural, or are you going to tell me it was caused by evil spirits?’

  He replied very gravely, ‘If you think for a minute, everything is natural, and everything is spirits.’

  Mama! I can just see you crossing and re-crossing yourself as you read these words! But I have to tell you the wonderful news that in the week since then, Françoise’s cancer has gone into a very rapid remission, and that she is bright-eyed and happy for the first time in months! She tells me that she saw the same things as myself, but that when I was unconscious she saw an angel, an hermaphrodite angel! She says it had a spear and a pair of scales, and that it kissed her on the mouth so she tingled all over. She is convinced it was the Archangel Raphael, but does not know why. Both Françoise and I are utterly ecstatic that she is getting better, as you may imagine. I was anticipating her death within a few weeks, and my heart was very heavy, which is now as light as a wren!

  If that were not strange enough, we were afflicted immediately afterwards in this area with the most extraordinary plague, though I hasten to add that it is a benign one. You may have noticed (how could you help it?) that there are muddy paw marks on the paper, and that my handwriting is unusually erratic. This is because there has been a large black cat trying to sit on the paper as I write, which is also taking swipes at my pen as it moves. ‘What is so strange about that?’ I hear you say. ‘My son loves cats.’ What is so strange, Maman, is that we are absolutely inundated with a flood of cats of Biblical proportions. I cannot describe to you the sheer quantity of these animals that have appeared out of nowhere! They are sitting on fence-posts, on gates. They are draped voluptuously across roofs and branches, they are in my jeep, in the house, in the stable, in the fields. I cannot sit out at night as is my wont, because three or four cats instantly leap on my lap and on to my shoulders, and they also occupy Françoise’s hammock on the porch. I have to turn them out of my sink before I can wash my hands, and also out of the shower last thing at night. In the morning Françoise and I wake up stifled and sweating from the weight of cats on our bed, and sometimes they wake me by sticking their coarse little tongues in my ears and purring. I cannot tell you how tickly that is!

  The odd thing is that I go around the house constantly shutting all the doors and windows, but they still appear and wrap themselves around my legs, as though they could walk through walls.

  Another funny thing is that as yet they have not, despite their omnipresence, annoyed me at all. They are not the usual mangy, flea-bitten and half-starved thieving little cats one normally sees around here, but are big and sleek, with fetching faces and charming demeanour. They do not steal food or dig up the garden or leave mouse-entrails all over the floor. Mostly they spend their time sitting on their haunches as though expecting something to happen, for which they are prepared to wait patiently. They are very affectionate, and purr unfailingly if you tickle their ears and cheeks. They are quite fearless and contented, and at night the sound of crickets has now been entirely replaced by the sound of purring, which strikes the ears as a kind of muffled roar, like hearing the sea from a distance. It is a much more calming noise than that of the crickets, and I for one am quite happy about it. Françoise was at first anxious about getting hay-fever, as she is allergic to cats, but so far, God be praised, she has not been affected, apart from tripping over a cat in the corridor when she went to the bathroom in the dark. Both she and the cat were fortunately unhurt.

  These cats are not just here on the estancia, they have apparently invaded the whole district. Within a radius of twenty kilometres everyone is overrun by them, and the dogs, it seems, are too scared to come out. I have seen small black and white ones with happy expressions, ginger ones, white ones with one blue and one green eye, immensely fluffy ones in smoky-blue and short-haired tabbies, but the most remarkable ones are the big black ones. I have become very fond of the one who sits on my blotter and tries to stop me writing.

  I have to say that yet more odd things have been happening. The bridge at Chiriguana recently exploded quite spectacularly, killing four soldiers. The dust of the explosion travelled as far as here, so that everything was turned white. The army camped there for a month and then left, and afterwards there was what I can only describe as a plague of laughing. I have not been able to get any sense out of most of the locals for quite some time because they only have to look at you to burst out into guffaws. My washerwoman inadvertently sprayed me with chicha-beer because she was drinking it when I came in to speak with her on account of her distracting chuckling. Instead of apologising she went off into further howls of hysterical mirth until I too was infected with it and began to laugh. Françoise came in to find out what the joke was, and very soon all three of us were screaming with laughter, our faces dripping with tears, and clutching our stomachs with the pain of the muscular contractions. The only way I could stop was by crawling out of the door and sticking my head into the rain-barrel. My throat hurt terribly afterwards, and so did that of Françoise, but we still cannot help laughing when we remember it.

  Everyone here is now paralysed with ferocious hilarity, and all work has completely ceased. I fear very much that soon someone will die as a consequence. Around here no one seems to think such extraordinary events as plagues of cats and plagues of laughter have any significance – I have been told that before I came there were in various places a plague of falling leaves, a plague of sleeplessness, one of invisible hailstones, a plague of amnesia, and another time there was a rainstorm for several years that reduced everything to rust and mould.

  I am pleased to say that since I last wrote the People’s Liberation Force has apparently forgotten about me, and I am bringing back the children. Also I have heard that Dona Constanza Evans was recently ransomed by her husband for half a millio
n dollars, and then absconded immediately to Costa Rica. I thought she was a terribly haughty and stiff woman, and so I think her husband is lucky to be shot of her even for so large a sum.

  Do you think you could investigate the possibility of sending over a new Land-Rover engine? Mine is now thirty years old and has been restored so many times that there are no more spares of oversized pistons or rings that one can obtain. The exchange rate is so appallingly adverse nowadays that I think it would be cheaper to send one from France, and I will pay you with what is left in my account with the Credit Lyonnaise.

  I hope you find this letter more cheering than my last. It is strange how one can be in the depths one minute and on the heights the next (and, of course, vice-versa).

  In conclusion, Maman, let me illustrate how much better life is by saying that outside there is a little black and white cat with yellow eyes that has been teaching itself to walk the tightrope on the washing-line – it has fallen off three times – and in the kitchen I hear Françoise and Farides the cook roaring with laughter.

  I kiss you many times,

  Your loving son,

  Antoine.

  28

  * * *

  THE BATTLE OF CHIRIGUANA

  AFTER A PROTRACTED, discreet and gentle courtship, including two years of fervent engagement, Profesor Luis, native of Medellin and dedicated educator of peasants, was to be married to Farides, native of Chiriguana, and cook to the French couple recently cured by Pedro and Aurelio. They were to be married in the little adobe church at Chiriguana by the itinerant priest with whom Profesor Luis used to discuss the ideas of Camilo Torres and Oscar Romero.

  Josef was overjoyed to see the priest again because he could now, having paid the priest for a proper burial, afford to pay him for three masses to be said for the repose of his soul and its rapid passage through purgatory. Once safely in heaven, Josef believed, he would be able to fornicate an infinite amount of times with inexhaustible pleasure, and this was his secret reason for having spent so much money so conscientiously on his death and resurrection. The priest had already told him that there was no sex in heaven, but Josef replied that this was self-contradictory, and therefore ‘. . . even God himself could not believe such a thing’. The priest sighed and left him to his simple peasant logic.