The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

by Louis de Bernières

  The President ordered the Chiefs of Staff to put an end to the terror, without actually stating that he knew they were responsible for it, but was secretly relieved when it abated not a jot. The military grant was partially calculated on a per capita basis, and the reduction in personnel was good for his anti-inflationary policies. He was also pleased at the reduction in potential coup-participators.

  The dirty war began to extend down through non-commissioned officers, and then to ordinary regulars, and finally to conscripts. The Ministry of Defence began to receive requests from people wishing to buy themselves out, and the President heard that they were all being refused. He happened to mention during a TV interview that, according to common law, all military personnel were entitled to appeal directly to the Head of State in matters of military justice, and he signed the subsequent flood of buy-out applications without even reading them.

  Those who could not afford to buy themselves out began to desert back to their towns and villages, and much energy was wasted in trying to track them down. The depletion in the Force de Frappe over the period of one year was extremely dramatic, both in terms of equipment and personnel, and the President was highly pleased. The only blot on the horizon was that Sanchis, Ramirez and Fleta were still intact and plotting, as the tapes continued to reveal, and moreover they seemed to be hinting that the terror was to be wound down. He saw that on the transcript Ramirez was recorded to have said, ‘I think it’s high time we crushed this terrorism. Don’t you agree that we should all take definite steps?’ And the other two were recorded as having made ‘affirmatory grunts’. He read that there was still no definite date for the coup, and still no clear leader.

  With a light heart the President called in on his wife’s gaudy little chamber. She pouted as he came in and reached out her arms.

  ‘Daddikins has called to play with his naughty little schoolgirl,’ announced His Excellency.

  36

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  ¡DE TU CASA A LA AGENA, SAL CON LA BARRIGADA LLENA!

  THERE WAS ONCE a painter who travelled into the cordillera in order to paint an invisible picture of Christ. When he had finished, the local Indians scrambled up the rocks to examine it and found that it was in fact a picture of Viracocha. A Chinaman passing by went up to see what it was that was causing such excitement, and found to his surprise that on the rock was a picture of the Buddha. The painter stuck to his assertion that it was Christ who was invisibly portrayed, and a loud and rancorous argument developed. In the midst of the altercation one of the Indians noticed that the portrait had erased itself.

  The truth is that the mountains are a place where you can find whatever you want just by looking, as long as you remember that they do not suffer fools gladly, and particularly dislike those with preconceived ideas.

  ‘I always meant to ask you,’ said Pedro, ‘why you did not stay in the mountains where you know how to live, but moved to the jungle where you had to learn everything from the beginning.’

  ‘It was because,’ replied Aurelio, ‘living in mountains which were not my home would have made me homesick. In the jungle I am more free of memories.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Pedro, ‘would you guide us, and teach us how to live before you return home?’

  ‘I have to do as you ask; I had already decided it, or you all would be dead in a few days. But I must tell Carmen. There is a tunday up here, and I will send her a message.’

  The convoy of men and animals was climbing up the end of the escarpment whence they had witnessed the flood, and were ascending towards a short plateau, a puna, which divided at the end into two valleys. Aurelio went ahead and found the huge hollow log set on cairns, with holes bored in it by fire. He took the club that was left inside it and began to beat the log so that it resounded and boomed. At one end he could make high notes and in the middle, deep ones. By varying the rhythm and pitch he was able to add emphasis and connotation to the simple code and tell Carmen that he would be gone a long time, doing something very important. He waited until he saw the smoke from the damp leaves that Carmen burned to tell him that she had heard, and then he put the club back into the body of the tunday, and rejoined the multitude.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ said Gloria, ‘that these cats keep getting bigger?’

  ‘I cannot pick them up any more,’ replied Constanza, ‘but they still play like kittens.’

  Father Garcia, who was walking with them, made no observations on the subject because he was just beginning to elaborate in his head a new theology that was becoming more and more interesting and convincing with every metre of altitude, and also more heretical.

  The guerrilleros were walking with the ease and economy of practice, but the villagers were already breathless, and aching in the calves and thighs. The animals were merely plodding in a herbivorous dream, snatching mouthfuls of vegetation as they passed it, and looking as though they had grown mobile lopsided whiskers of grass and flowers.

  Having arrived at the lower slopes of the mountains, it was realised that no one had a very clear idea of where they were going or what they were going to do when they got there. Under the circumstances one choice seemed as good as another, and so when Sergio told Pedro and Hectoro that in a dream Federico had told him that they should find the source of the flood, they shrugged their shoulders and agreed, except that Aurelio said there would be no food along the flood valleys because it would all have been swept away.

  ‘We will walk every day,’ said Sergio, ‘and with luck Federico will tell me every night where we are to go on the next day.’

  ‘With respect,’ said Aurelio, ‘Federico is not an Indian. In the mountains, Indians travel only in straight lines, no matter what is in the way. In this manner we never get lost. Tell Federico to take us in straight lines, and to admit when he is lost.’

  ‘He is a spirit,’ rejoined Sergio indignantly. ‘Spirits do not get lost.’

  ‘You do not know spirits, then,’ said Aurelio. ‘They know little more than they did in life, and have the same faults, including the ability to get lost.’

  Once on the puna the people stopped to gather alfalfa and ichu for the animals, and loaded it in bundles on the backs of the already burdened beasts, because there is one golden rule of the mountains: ‘From your house to that of another, always go with your belly full!’ The Indians themselves could ignore this rule because they could keep going for days on coca, which miraculously reduces hunger and thirst and gives energy, but which frequently kills them at an early age as their bodies consume themselves.

  Whilst the others gathered fodder, Pedro and Misael went off together up the slopes to stalk a small flock of vicuna that was browsing above. Circling, the two men climbed above the animals, and then crept down out of sight and downwind. At close range they managed to shoot four of them as they ran, and the flock took off at high speed across the rocks. As the men descended to call for helpers to bring the bodies down, Misael said, ‘How are we to feed two thousand on four vicunas?’

  ‘We cannot,’ replied Pedro. ‘But we have plenty of food in the packs. Those who cannot hunt can live on plants for the time being.’

  Down on the puna the animals were skinned and dismembered, and Pedro and Misael gave away what they could not carry themselves. Aurelio took the skins because he knew how to make the warmest garments and boas out of them, which would be needed before long if they were to take a portachuelo above the snowline.

  At the end of the plateau the travellers took the right hand quebrada, and had to scramble over the alluvial lloclia that always seems to accumulate at the bottom entrance of any valley or ravine, and which consists of scattered piles of rocks and animal bones.

  All about them they saw the remains of the past life that had once made these mountains a veritable ants’ nest of activity. On the slopes were the andenes, the terraces built up on walls of stones that once fed the old civilisation. On the valley floor were the fallen remnants of small houses built of tapiales, a mud version of Don E
mmanuel’s bricks, made in a lattice of planks. The people could see by the outlines of walls that these were places where farmers once lived on their chacaras, and herded llamas and alpacas for wool and meat, and where now there were only one or two tambos, travellers’ huts roughly constructed of bundles of maguey-fibre bound together.

  As their pathway rose ever upward the plants changed. Already there was nothing growing here that would have been recognised in the emerald lushness of the jungle or on the expanse of the Mula basin. Up here there were long grasses, acacia, guinual and quishua trees, and delicate twisted shrubs with white flowers and silver-downed leaves that give off a delicious aroma when burned. Here and there, in places sheltered from the wind but not from the sun, stood firebushes, some of them twelve metres high, their scarlet flowers flaming brilliantly in exuberant drapes of blossom, and at one and a half thousand metres there were fragrant stands of cedar, constituting the little woods that the Indians call ‘jaguey’. High above there wheeled black vultures that the people thought were condors (until they saw a real one) and there were white alcamarini birds among the rocks on the sides of the slopes.

  To the people these unaccustomed sights, these strange plants, and the little vizcacha squirrels that ran chittering away from them, seemed to be miracles from another creation. And how cold was the water of the streams, so that when you drank it you developed a headache instantaneously and rubbed your temples, saying ‘Ay, ay, ay!’ with the pain, and making up your mind not to use it for washing your intimate parts until it was warmed a little.

  They wondered at the small wild cattle that roamed free in the valley, so different from the huge ceibus that they had experienced hitherto, and which were raising a constant lowing as though passing messages to each other. Sometimes one of them slipped on the rocky paths, or when crossing a river, and then the people would have to reset its scattered or sodden load and bully it into rejoining the recua so that it could be tied back into the train. All day there were shouts of ‘Ay, mula!’, ‘Vamos, bribon!’ and the long drawn-out ‘Tscha-a-a-ah!’ to keep the beasts moving. For a little while a small wild bull followed the train, and those at the back nicknamed it ‘Nicolito’ and tried to persuade it to approach nearer, but it was wary, and turned away, standing on the top of a knoll to watch them go, so that afterwards they missed it with the same feeling that you feel when you say farewell to someone who under better circumstances could have been a friend.

  The cats, who were still growing bigger all the time, gambolled amongst the rocks ambushing each other and rolling down inclines as they wrestled. Some of them were padding seriously beside the people they had adopted, and others were trying to creep up on the wild goats and birds that were too wily to be caught. The cats hated to wet their feet in the streams and rivers, and were especially afraid of the pongos, the white-water rapids; they would sit growling at the water whilst everyone passed over, and then pace anxiously along the bank as they receded into the distance. When at last the anxiety of losing their people grew too much, they would gingerly cross, raising their paws to shake off the freezing water at every step, and growling in their throats.

  The biblical procession passed through a small settlement of chozas where the people hid from them behind their doorways, and peeped out, confused and alarmed. ‘Shami,’ said Aurelio to one of them, in Quechua, ‘come here.’ Hearing his own tongue the man cautiously came out, and Aurelio exchanged greetings with him and asked where one might camp the night. The man, whose throat was hideously bloated from coto – a deficiency of iodine – seemed to be retarded and Aurelio obtained little sense from him, but he waved vaguely up the valley and said, ‘Beyond the campina.’

  They passed through the campina, where the cholos were growing potatoes, barley, and alfalfa in small plots, and where sheep were grazing on the slopes above, and found themselves in a lunar world of volcanic tufa, and ash which swirled and choked them every time there was a gust of wind, ever stronger and colder as they ascended.

  Already the snowcaps topped the mountains around them, and riding the updraughts the condor-vultures spread their enormous wings and circled at mighty altitudes in the hope of carrion below. Somewhere from the heights above a shepherd was playing music; it was the haunting, wistful music of the Inca people, who make the quena flute from the great hollow thigh-bones of the condor, and play yavari by blowing it inside the olla, the earthenware pot that causes the notes to echo and linger with pain, with longing, and with unbounded nostalgia.

  Dolores’ little girl, Raimunda, was suddenly stung painfully by a mountain scorpion, the ubiquitous alacran, and her foot swelled up while she screamed and howled with both surprise and anguish. Dolores made the child hold her foot in the icy stream, and then Sergio took her on his back, where she clung, still crying, with her arms around his neck, and her foot throbbing and pulsing as though it contained an exploding sun.

  They journeyed past some of the old mining works that had been producing gold, silver, quicksilver, and lead long before the conquistadors arrived with their rapacious souls of broken glass and chipped flint and who enslaved the miners after learning from them all their secrets, paying for it with their bones. Those who looked and knew what to see could still find the beautiful Inca pots that used to be buried with the dead, and are consequently known as ‘huacos’. They were made of a pair joined together, carefully ornamented with intricate, grotesque and skilful mouldings. They could be made in the form of animals, or ducks, and given acoustic properties so that when you poured water from one to another the sound would imitate the animals, and if there were two ducks they would make the sound of ducks fighting, so that other ducks would become alarmed and join in the clamour. The art of making these whimsical and enchanting pots is lost, and now they are found only in graves and as shards amongst the ruins of that arcane civilisation.

  One might also find by the streams long-discarded porongos, the gold pans over which people would squat tirelessly sifting the silt until only the bright specks of gold remained. Where there were lodes, farallons, one could still see the narrow entrances to mines, or the places where giant vertical seams had been ripped from the mountain sides, and perhaps there would be the ruins of the great kimbaletes, huge dinosaurial machines of granite where a rocking stone would crush the ore with water and quicksilver. Everywhere there lay great piles of discarded ore awaiting the greedy hands of some new conquistador.

  In the streams one might still find the ingenious run-offs and channels of the gold-farmers, who knew how to extract by the force of their own motion the flakes of gold from the sediment, and perhaps nearby there would be the pieces of the clay guayra ovens for refining, which worked without bellows because their shape caught the wind.

  But it was long since that the adventurers had gone, now that rich men made money by speculating with money and not having to do real work. It was long since that one had heard the eager question in Quechua, ‘Ori cancha?’ or risked the desconfianza of the suspicious Indians and the fatal onslaughts of armed ladrones who lived by parasitism on those that worked, and slunk away to kill each other over their gains. Nowadays, nobody arrived with a mule and a pick-axe to stake his pertenencia and work his body to ruin either to die of exhaustion or to go home rich. Nowadays, people desecrated ancient graves, and left herbs under their heads at night so that they would dream where the gold was buried, and there were no more mad adventurers whose greed was jewelled with hardship and heroism.

  When that evening the multitude made their encampment, Aurelio showed people how to catch freshwater prawns by damming the stream with stakes driven into the bed, through which willow twigs were wound. A hole was left in the middle and a basket held up against it so that the water flowed through, leaving the crustaceans in the bottom, to be patiently shelled and avariciously eaten.

  The animals were hobbled and given the fodder that they had carried on their backs, and the people heated food over little fires, wishing that they had tents and ponchos. Some of them
amused themselves by burning patterns in their gourds with heated knives, and others told stories or sang. Many were already beginning to shake and sweat and shiver with tercianas, the mountain fever as inevitable as it is inexplicable; it can lay a man out such that he feels he is about to die, but then an hour later he feels better than ever before and walks with a new sprightliness, only to find himself cast down again so that he never felt so ‘raquitico’ in all his life.

  As the fires were lit and the lowering sun blazed crimson and scarlet off the snows of the peaks, the skies turned turquoise before they darkened. The cats, inveterately nocturnal, left to hunt, and when the stars were scintillating like diamonds in the cobalt and indigo cushion of the night they returned, bringing cui and ducks, vizcacha, and wild goats for the people to eat.

  ‘They are quite something, these gatos,’ people said, and ate with one arm around the animals, caressing their soft ears and cheeks. In the morning the cats would be the size of pumas, but that night they huddled together for warmth, cat and human alike, and the valley echoed gently with the sibilant reverberations of purring.

  37

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  NEMESIS: GENERAL FUERTE CALLS IN ON THE ESCUADRON DE LA MUERTE

  GENERAL RAMIREZ HAD recently resumed his adolescent habit of biting his nails. He had just torn a thumbnail off with his teeth and had caused the root of the nail to bleed on one side. He was enjoying chewing the nail at the same time as comforting the wound by tucking his thumb under his fingers.

  He was a worried man. He had lost a staggering amount of men and equipment in the internecine dirty war, and had begun to feel a steady diminution in his power and influence. He felt that even the President did not take him seriously any more, and now there was this business with General Fuerte to worry about, as well as there being still no decision as to who would be President after the coup.