The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

by Louis de Bernières

  Raoul Buenanoce was a cultured man who foresaw a great future for the capital under his paternal guidance. Here is his speech upon acceding to office in the same year as Dr Badajoz:

  ‘We have indeed a proud city, with its splendid colonial edifices, its four high-rise blocks, its parks and boulevards! We have here a branch of Selfridges where one can buy leather and jewellery! We have men and women who are as elegantly dressed as those of Paris. We have four theatres that show the best productions of Buenos Aires and Madrid! In 1944 Segovia performed here, and again in 1963!

  ‘But we cannot rest on our laurels! It is my intention that by the end of my term of office our beloved capital will not only be the capital of our proud nation, but the cultural capital of the civilised world! I shall utterly remove the favelas, those “villas miserias” that ring our suburbs, and in their place I shall build a park such as the world has never seen! It will be a park where our grateful citizens may go for rest and recreation after they have wiped the sweat of the toil of the day from their brows!’

  This noble oration, followed by loud applause, preceded the most extraordinarily ambitious building programme in the history of the world.

  His first project was to build a giant motorway to the airport which would cut right through the middle of the city. He raised $1,000 million on the international markets and cut a swathe through the most ancient and historical part of the city, since the motorway was to be fifteen lanes wide. It was absolutely straight except for where it had to go round the Norwegian Embassy, which had refused to move until Regina Olsen was released. Buenanoce made three thousand people homeless, and the project was never completed because he was impatient to get on with the park. The last part of the motorway ended half-way across a bridge, and everyone still drove to the airport along the old route.

  Buenanoce destroyed the shanty towns and moved three hundred thousand people out by force. When they moved back in again he formed his own private secret service whose first task was to intimidate the shanty-dwellers into absenting themselves permanently. After that he kept them on to keep an eye on his own employees and to root out dissent in the capital.

  In building his motorway Buenanoce had used 200,000 tonnes of asphalt, 4,000 steel supports, and 700,000 cubic metres of concrete, but this was nothing in comparison with the cost of recreating the great wonders of the world in the recreation park. ‘I know exactly what is to be done,’ he said, smiling through his many chins. ‘I have enough experience to know that it is necessary to have a very great many plans, and once you start, not to stop.’

  The immense project was intended to cost the public purse nothing at all, since all investment was to be raised on the private sector by competitive tender, and any losses in running profit were to be borne by those investors. The successful company would be loaned $50 million from public funds which it would have to repay from profits. If work was not completed on time, the company would have to pay $20,000 per day in penalties.

  Thus it was all very business-like, except that the company which won the contract was run by an Air Force General, an Army Brigadier, and a Naval Rear-Admiral. Buenanoce raised an extra $20 million for them as a goodwill gesture, and in order to build everything on time they started all the projects simultaneously. This is what they began to build:

  A zoological garden, an aquarium, a giant amusement park, a cinema, a six-hundred-foot tower that revolved at its base, multicoloured fountains, a dance hall for fifteen thousand people, and an ecological park. In addition, there were exact reproductions of: all the Maya ruins at Chichen Itza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Tower of Babel, the Pyramids, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty, St Paul’s Cathedral, St Basil’s Cathedral, St Peter’s, the Sphinx, the Castle of Cartagena in Colombia, Michelangelo’s David (twice the original size), Machu Pichu, the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the Fortress of Cuzco, the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building, the Observatory at Intihuatana, the City of Petra, the Eiffel Tower, the abandoned opera house at Manaos, Notre-Dame, the standing stones of Carnac and Stonehenge, the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan, the Temple of Conde at Palenque, the Forbidden City in Peking, El Escorial, the Copenhagen Mermaid (twice life size), the Temple of Viracocha, the Tower of London, the Palace of the Sultan of Brunei, Huanaco Viejo, a scale model of the Ural Mountains, the Palace of Huayna-Capac, and a scaled-down version of the Panama Canal, spanned by a quarter-size model of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The project was known as Incarama, and soon there began to be rumours that all was not going well. Part of the trouble was that the customs had agreed, in return for certain considerations, not to check the vast containers coming in through the sea-ports. Instead of Ferris wheels and meal trolleys, these containers were rumoured to be full of tanks, armoured cars, aircraft spares, missiles, contraceptives, flannels, national flags, electric cattle prods, toothpaste, lavatory paper, calculators, and foreign works of art. Additionally, the invoices seemed curiously inflated, and most of the money inexplicably found its way into fixed-interest deposit accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Jersey, where it was credited to the shareholders of Incarama.

  The construction deadline came and went, and no penalties were exacted. The consortium was given an extra six months for completion, and a further bridging loan from city funds of $20 million. Then Incarama collapsed and went into liquidation, leaving none of the individual projects completed. So enormous were the debts that its chief creditor bank also collapsed, and had to be taken over by the national bank, which destroyed Dr Badajoz’ financial projections for that year.

  The capital was bankrupt, and Raoul Buenanoce closed down the hospitals and the social services before fleeing to Uruguay with trunkfuls of $100 bills. The city is now famous throughout Latin America for having its favelas situated amongst the most picturesque classical ruins, and for having its water supply delivered by a replica of the Panama Canal.

  34

  * * *

  GENERAL FUERTE ENJOYS THE HOSPITALITY OF THE ARMY INTERNAL SECURITY SERVICE

  THE BRIGADIER HAD read Colonel Figueras’ report with wide-eyed incredulity, especially disbelieving the only bits that were actually true, which were those detailing the plague of cats and the plague of laughter. He read of Figueras’ heroic attacks and counter-attacks against incredible odds, and read of a valiant rearguard action in which Figueras held a bridge for twenty minutes singlehanded so that his men could escape. He called in all the survivors and interviewed every one of them. Then he summoned Figueras.

  Figueras’ ears were still burning from the Brigadier’s tirade, and his heart was still leaden from his demotion to Lieutenant when General Fuerte, walking like the living dead, crossed his path on the parade ground. Figueras stopped and looked at the shabby, shuffling creature with his stubble, his vacant eyes, his clanking mochilas, and his cat folded in his arms. ‘Who are you?’ demanded Figueras.

  The General thought for a minute, and replied distantly, ‘I am very sorry to have taken so long. I was with the guerrilleros.’

  ‘With the guerrilleros!’ exclaimed Figueras. He put his hand into one of the mochilas, hoping they were full of coins, and drew out several identity discs. He examined them carefully. ‘You came from Chiriguana with these?’

  The General thought again. ‘Someone brought me and the cat in a lorry. I am sorry to have taken so long.’

  ‘Come with me,’ said Figueras, drawing his pistol. He stuck it in the small of the General’s back and escorted him to the guardroom, where he pushed him in and locked the door. He went back to the Brigadier.

  ‘Not you again,’ was the comment that greeted him.

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ said Figueras. ‘I have some important news. I have just arrested at great personal risk an armed guerrillero who was carrying on his person all the identity discs of those killed at Chiriguana.’

  The Brigadier sighed wearily. ‘Lieutenant,’ he drawled, emphasising the word, ‘you forget that my window overlooks the parade ground.
You have just arrested an old tramp with a cat and a lot of bags.’

  ‘The bags contain the discs, Sir, and he told me he had been with the guerrilleros. That is the truth,’ he added.

  ‘Very well, Lieutenant, notify the Army Internal Security Service and have them come to take him away for questioning. Kindly do not let me see your face again for a very long time. You may dismiss.’

  Figueras saluted and left, and went straight to the radio operator with a message for him to transmit. ‘Do not put it in writing,’ said the operator, who was familiar with Figueras’ illegibility and illiteracy. ‘Just dictate it.’

  The General sat in his cell for two days with his cat, and did not notice that no one fed him. He had long since developed a method of being completely asleep whilst remaining awake, and he entertained himself with lucid dreams and childhood memories. He took no notice when no one fed him for three days during the bumpy ride to the capital in the boot of the Ford Falcon, but he missed the cat which they had wrenched from his arms and sent dashing away across the parade ground. ‘That was my cat,’ he said sadly.

  When he arrived at the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering the two pyragues handed the General over to El Verdugo, who read the report that was thrust into his hands.

  ‘Name Unknown – subject demented – believed to be guerrilla, Chiriguana People’s Vanguard – To be questioned closely – usual questions.’

  Roughly El Verdugo pushed his victim through the corridors, past the cells full of weeping prisoners and the stench of excrement. The General did not see the notice on the wall which said, ‘We will keep on killing until people understand.’ He did not see the bare lightbulbs or the hysterical naked girl covered with bruises and burns who was pulled past him by the hair. He did not see the dried pools of blood on the floor or the streaks of it on the walls, and he did not smell the putrefying and burning flesh. He was seeing an Emperor butterfly on a bloom of acacia and a humming-bird in a blue lupinus.

  El Verdugo pushed the General into the hanging room and tied his wrists behind his back. He attached a carabina on a rope to the bonds and took up the strain on the rope, which ran through a- pulley bolted on to the ceiling. El Verdugo, with scientific detachment and expertise, jerked suddenly on the rope, and noted with surprise that despite the cracking of the shoulder joints the General did not cry out. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, jerking the rope again.

  ‘Emperor,’ said the General, still dreaming.

  ‘Emperor of what?’ said El Verdugo, jerking the rope again.

  ‘Acacia,’ said the General. El Verdugo went to his desk and wrote, ‘Subject says he is Emperor of Asia.’

  ‘If you are trying to be amusing,’ said El Verdugo through gritted teeth, ‘let’s see how this amuses you.’ He hauled the General up to the ceiling and let him drop, suddenly clamping the friction brake mounted on the floor beneath his foot. The General’s shoulders cracked with a noise like a snapping bough. ‘Who are you now, Emperor?’

  ‘They’ve taken my cat,’ whispered the General, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Where is my cat?’

  El Verdugo returned to his desk. ‘Subject is plainly a lunatic,’ he wrote, ‘and insensible to pain.’

  He let the General down and cut his bonds, so that his arms hung uselessly at his side like those of a jointed wooden doll. El Verdugo was reluctant to give up, but he had more responsive and satisfying victims to torture, so he crucified the General upside-down on the grille against the wall. He hung there all night dreaming of cats, seeing and hearing nothing of the twenty people whose bodies and whose sanity El Verdugo broke whilst the capital slept.

  The next morning El Verdugo handed the General over to El Bano. El Bano looked expertly into the empty eyes of his victim. ‘I’ll make him talk,’ he said, and led the General to his special baths. He threw the General into a tank and held him under. The General dreamed of being in the womb and stopped breathing. His bodily functions had slowed so near to a complete halt that El Bano could have held him under for an hour with no result. When El Bano withdrew his hands the General did not rise, gasping and choking as the others always did. He lay smiling beneath the water with a string of tiny bubbles emerging from his mouth. El Bano dragged him out and immersed him in a bath of urine and faeces, holding him under for four minutes. He gave up and had the General taken away so that he could instead torture people who grovelled and pleaded and acknowledged his total domination.

  It was El Electricista who restored the General to sanity and to the reality of pain. He strapped the General to Susana, his metal grille, and slipped rings over his fingers, earthed by wires to the grille. He threw a bucket of water over the motionless body for better conductivity, and switched on his picana. He ran it down the General’s leg and the body shook and convulsed. The General felt a bolt of lightning tear his muscles to pieces and he awoke instantaneously from his long reverie. He jerked his head up and found he could not move. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘El Electricista,’ replied the torturer, ‘at your service.’ Delighted with his success he applied the cattle prod to the other leg. The General jolted and screamed. ‘That’s better,’ said El Electricista. ‘Now who are you?’

  ‘General Carlo Maria Fuerte,’ said the General. ‘Military Governor of Cesar. I am going to have you shot when I get out of here.’

  ‘But you won’t,’ replied El Electricista. ‘So you are the Emperor of Asia and a General, eh?’ He touched the picana on his victim’s navel for several seconds. Once more the General convulsed uncontrollably and howled. Breathless and racked he repeated, ‘I am General Fuerte.’

  ‘You are a guerrilla from Chiriguana,’ said El Electricista, touching the picana to the General’s mouth. When the screaming died away, the General spat the blood from his gums and said, ‘I am General Fuerte. I was kidnapped by the guerrilleros months ago, and then they released me.’

  ‘Liar!’ exclaimed El Electricista, and he pressed the picana into the General’s left nipple, smiling and relishing the shrieks and the smell of burning flesh and the spasms. His erection began to grow.

  ‘You know which bits I am working up to, don’t you?’ he taunted. ‘Tell me about the guerrillas and the other scum you associate with.’

  The General was about to tell him when he pressed the point of the prod into his right nipple. He was about to tell him when he touched it to the base of his penis on the right hand side. When the General had finished urinating uncontrollably, and sobbing and retching, El Electricista said, ‘I think you were about to tell me something?’

  The General started to tell him about being captive and about how this was all a mistake, when the prod was applied to the base of his penis on the left hand side. When he resumed consciousness El Electricista poured more water over him and said, ‘We haven’t tried the best bit yet, have we?’ and he ran the prod across the General’s testicles and up his penis to the tip. The General felt his body tear a thousand times into tiny shreds, as though ripped by pincers, and he did not wake until next morning, when he found he could not use his arms, and he recollected the previous day’s torture.

  El Electricista came in for him and kicked him to the ground. ‘I have a treat for you,’ he said, and pulled the General by his hair to the electrical room. On the grille was a young girl of about sixteen, naked and bruised, her body covered with burns and blotches. El Electricista took a revolver in one hand and a whip in the other. He put the picana in the General’s hand and switched it on. ‘Torture her,’ he commanded.

  The General was stunned. ‘I will not,’ he said.

  The whip wrapped around his body, and the metal shards embedded in its plaits tore strips of flesh as it cut across him. ‘Torture her!’ screamed El Electricista, ‘or she will torture you!’

  ‘I don’t have the use of my arms,’ replied the General. ‘And if I had, I would break your neck or die in the attempt.’

  ‘Brave words, Comunista! You have made your choice.
’

  The tortured and terrified girl looked up at him with horror and pleading in her eyes as he pretended to be about to touch the prod to her breasts and her genitals.

  ‘No, no, no!’ she was repeating. ‘Please no.’

  ‘You know all about this, don’t you, flaca? Now shall I play with you, or will you play with this nice gentleman?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said desperately.

  ‘I can,’ said El Electricista, leering at her, and lowering the picana very slowly towards her breast.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Please, I’ll do it.’

  The girl was sobbing, blinded with tears, as she obeyed the torturer’s instructions. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m sorry,’ she kept saying as she touched the picana to the General and he shook and screamed. El Electricista was saying, ‘On the balls, you bitch. No! Longer than that! Harder! More water!’ and he was slashing her with the whip if she stopped or hesitated. In the end the thrill became more than he could bear any longer, and he raped the girl frenziedly across the General’s unconscious body and then shot her through the throat. He left the General on Susana for the night, and savagely kicked the body of the dead girl, shouting ‘Bitch! Bitch! Whore!’ Then, pulling himself together, he went off for his date with his girlfriend, to see O Lucky Man with subtitles in Spanish.

  ‘My poor querido,’ she said. ‘You look so tired. You shouldn’t let them work you so hard.’

  He laughed suavely. ‘One has to do one’s duty.’

  When Asado returned from the special liquidation assignment two days later he strolled into El Electricista’s room and said, ‘How’s it going? Anything new?’