The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (11 page)

Behind Pedro came two virgins, certified as such by a committee of women, bearing straw effigies of the Blessed Virgin, which would be cast in the river before fishing began. Behind these were Hectoro with the black glove still on his rein-hand, his revolver at his side, and his leather bombachos creaking on his legs as he walked. Today he felt awkward at being on foot, as he never left his mule or his horse except to eat or sleep or fornicate, and had even trained his men to make concrete and mortar in real gaucho style, by riding their horses backwards and forwards over the mix. No man, however, could be mounted on this procession, not even Hectoro, and so he walked, feeling foolish and vulnerable.

Beside Hectoro came Josef, who as ever was thinking about the ignominy of not having a proper funeral, and behind these two were Profesor Luis, Consuelo, Farides, and all the occupants of the pueblo and its countryside, including the children, who chanted a repetitive song in order to charm the fish. Everybody, including all children above the age of ten, smoked a large puro cigar so that the air would be fragrant enough to repel evil spirits, and thick enough to materialise the good ones.

The procession passed the hacienda of Don Emmanuel, who was preparing an alcoholic guarapo made of pineapple skins, in order to treat the processors on their way home, and crossed the field to the Mula, which had this year swapped to its southern course during the rains. Here Pedro turned and raised his arms, and a silence fell on the crowd. To his right the sun began its sudden descent behind the hills, until its reddening rays struck the snow of the mountains opposite and the sky glowed and vibrated in the 360 degree sunset that strikes religion into the hearts even of animals and birds, who fall into a hush broken only by the ripple of water.

Pedro threw back his head and his arms, and, as though encircling all the holiness of the universe, began the long
ululating chant. Against the stillness of the falling night the pagan enchantment of his voice stirred the crowd so that chills of fire ran from their loins to their spines, and each felt a glow of invisible light dance above their head. Many stood as though paralysed, with tears streaming silently down their cheeks, and others sank reverently to the earth, brought down on their knees by the incomprehensible and the numinous. Against the rapidly gathering darkness the figure of Pedro the Hunter began to grow; at first it seemed he was larger by a hand’s width, but then he seemed to be as tall as a horse. Soon he appeared as tall as a tree, and the people knew that he had assumed the form of a god. Summoned up from the stomach, the seat of emotion, Pedro’s voice issued forth from his throat, now echoing as a cavern echoes. Nobody understood the words in that forgotten language. They did not understand it, but they apprehended it; they apprehended the language of the ancient gods of Africa.

When Pedro stopped, a final chill of fire ran back down the spines of the people and returned to their loins. There was a stillness, a relief, and a sense of privilege and humility. Pedro was once more a silver-haired black hunter, now leaning on his musket, and smiling benignly. ‘Vamos, pescadores,’ he said.

The straw virgins were cast into the water, the people lit their lanterns and torches, drew their machetes from their scabbards, and waded carefully into the river, for although it was only knee deep, the current was extremely strong. The fish, confused, disorientated, and attracted by the lights, swam up near the surface and wriggled blindly amongst the fishers. Each man and woman struck one fish, for that was all that was permissible, and then they waded out to wait for the others. It is no easy matter to catch fish in this manner, for one has to allow for the displacement of light when shining through water, and more importantly, the broad blade of a machete is easily sent off course when slicing through water, so that it is alarmingly easy to wound one’s own feet and legs by mistake. This is no small thing when the blow is fierce and the blade razor-sharp; it is easy to remove a foot or sever a muscle with the suddenness of thought.

As soon as one’s fish was brought to the bank; one’s luck was set for the following year, the degree depending upon whether one had caught a gamitana, a zungaro, a chitari, or a comelon; in this way everyone had some luck, but some had more than others, an attitude which is both optimistic and realistic at the same time. When all the people had a fish the crowd processed back to the village, drinking Don Emmanuel’s guarapo on the way; Don Emmanuel himself joined the procession, his red beard glinting in the torchlight, and his crude remarks causing squeals of delight amongst the older women. For the rest there was a mood of nervousness, for by that time everybody knew that the army was once more in the area, and that there would be soldiers at the fiesta.

The soldiers were already in the village when its inhabitants arrived. Comandante Figueras wore his cap low over his eyes in his anxiety not to be recognised, and as the people drew into the single street he brought his two columns of men sharply to attention. The procession stopped, and there was an uneasy murmur. Figueras stepped forward and saluted the crowd, a gesture that would have struck them all as wildly comical if it had not also seemed so odd.

‘Citizens!’ he exclaimed in a voice that was as full of fervour as he could feign. ‘Do not be alarmed! We are on our way to another place and we join you in your celebrations before we leave, hoping to bear with us your good wishes!’

He turned about, snapped his heels together, and bawled, ‘Present arms!’ The men presented arms and in one slightly ragged movement brought the weapons to their shoulders, stepped forward with one foot, and pointed the barrels to the sky. ‘Fire!’ he yelled, and a crowd of vultures hastily left the tree nearby. ‘Fire!’ he yelled twice more, and the metallic clash of the shots receded into the night. Figueras turned once more to the perplexed and astonished crowd, and called out, ‘Vamos!’ In English, Don Emmanuel muttered to himself, ‘Twenty-one bum salute,’ and Josef tapped Hectoro on the shoulder: ‘There will be trouble tonight.’

‘Good,’ said Hectoro.

The fiesta proceeded at first better than might be expected; Profesor Luis had rigged his little windmill generator to a record player, so that people could dance to records. Every time the breeze changed the music went faster or slower, but nobody minded because it’s not difficult to dance faster or slower, after all.

A dancing area had been cordoned off in the street, and very soon so much dust had been kicked up by the dancers that it was impossible to see anything. In those days before rock music had got as far as the village everybody was crazy about Bambuco and Vallenato, two types of dance music characterised by a fascinating complexity of syncopation, and by the use of the tiple, a ten-stringed instrument that looks like a small guitar and is played rather like a mandolin or a bazouki. At that time the popular dance was ‘El Pollo Del Vallenato’ which was intended to be an imitation of the chicken. The people would scratch in the dust with one foot in imitation of looking for bugs, they would strut with the ludicrous solemnity of cockerels, they would make darting movements of the head in imitation of pecking, and they would flap their arms. At the end of the record they would let loose a startling cacophony of clucks and squawks, and then break into delighted laughter before peeling away to fetch another bottle of Aguila.

On account of the night and the fact that everyone was disinhibited by alcohol and made expansive by marijuana, nobody had recognised Figueras, who was soon lying flat on his face outside Consuelo’s whorehouse, whose small staff had been augmented by a busload of exceptionally young whores from Chiriguana. It was a cause for much pride if one had a little whore in the family, because of the excellent income, and so many girls began at twelve; however, girls who were not whores were expected to remain virgins until sixteen, and marriage. Any detected lapse of this code was dealt with by bullets. It must be said, nevertheless, that on this night the whoring was intense and arduous, and many girls came out to dance rather than get wearier and sorer.

It was drawing near to midnight and the revelry had reached
such a pitch that nobody really knew what was going on any more, when a late-arriving vaquero decided to make a grand entrance in the style of the ancient cowboy films that were the staple fare of urban cinemas. He galloped into the village, whooping, and firing his revolver into the air.

The effect on the reeling soldiers was dramatic and instantaneous. They all reached the same conclusion at the same time; they had been set up for a Communist ambush. Mayhem ensued as they dropped to the ground or dodged behind buildings, firing wildly into the crowd, which dispersed as though by magic, leaving behind a horse whinnying in stricken pain, two dead infants, three dead adults, and several more wounded, who lay moaning and quivering in the dust without hope of rescue.

The gun battle that ensued lasted until each man had used up all his ammunition, which took about an hour and a half. Not knowing where the Communists were, they fired at the places where they could see the flashes of shots, which is to say that they shot at each other. This was done in a haze of intoxication and bowel-wrenching panic and so only four were slaughtered and ten wounded. The hideous finale of this melancholy episode occurred when a soldier lobbed a grenade behind a partition and a corporal emerged from behind it, staggering and clutching at his stomach. He lurched to the centre of the street, stood motionless for a second, and began to howl a long unearthly howl of terror and supplication. He raised his arms to heaven, and in that one movement his entrails burst from his stomach and slithered grotesquely to the earth. Whimpering and weeping he fell to the ground amongst them.

The soldiers, stunned into sobriety by horror, began to call out to each other, and then very cautiously began to emerge. They gathered around the body of their corporal and looked at it and at each other in silence, looking away and shrugging their shoulders with gestures of ‘I am not guilty, all of this is nothing to do with me’ whenever another caught their eye.

Figueras awoke from his stupor outside Consuelo’s whorehouse and sat up groggily, rubbing his eyes. He rose unsteadily
to his feet and urinated for a very long time against the wall of the building. He belched with sonorous satisfaction and turned round. For a second he could not believe his eyes as he stared with stupid incomprehension at the carnage around him; ‘Mierda maricon’ was all he could think of to say.

He swayed as he walked over to his men, looked down at the corpse, and crossed himself. ‘Let’s go back to camp,’ he said, his face ashen-white.

The soldiers left the village in a clumsy attempt at furtiveness, and the villagers slowly began to appear from the houses. They stood in the street exactly as the soldiers had done, in bewilderment and amazement. Profesor Luis turned off the record player, which all this time had been repeating and repeating again the merry strains of ‘El Pollo Del Vallenato’, and Pedro spoke up clearly. ‘They must be repaid for this!’ Hectoro took his revolver from his belt and strode off. Ten shots were heard as he despatched the wounded soldiery.

When Figueras and his men left in the truck and the jeep the next day, they passed the bodies of some of the soldiers hanging in the trees, already half-stripped by the vultures. Beneath the bodies the dogs fought for the bits which fell off. Figueras did not stop, and nor did he stop until he reached Valledupar, a town in which he later heard the news that he was to be awarded another decoration for his heroic resistance to a vastly superior guerrilla force. He was also to receive command of an enlarged force of men who were to destroy the Communists once and for all, by whatever means.

THE NAVANTES WERE
proud that white people were scared of them and called their river ‘The River of the Dead’. They dropped hints that it had been they who had killed Colonel Fawcett, his son, and Raleigh Rimell, and they possessed a carbine said to have belonged to Winton, whom they had purportedly poisoned with adulterated chicha and set adrift in a canoe. They were hospitable to white people on condition that they never tried to leave; if they did they were clubbed to death with bordanas. They called a knife a ‘couteau’, which they had learned from a French explorer, and pronounced in the finest Parisian accent, and they knew a song called ‘Cuddle up a little closer, Baby Mine’ that they had learned by heart from a diamond and gold prospecting party of yanquis, Peruvians and Brazilians that had befriended them with gifts of salt and displays of Roman candles, but who had managed to escape in 1935, in the time when Maharon was chief. The song, a little altered by the folk process, was still sung at initiations of sub-chiefs and at weddings.

The Navantes, like the jungle Indians in general, are the most widely travelled people in the world even though they never leave the forest or the cerrado. They accomplish their cosmopolitan itineraries with the aid of ayahuasca potions, which give them unlimited powers of telepathy (hence the
alternative name of ‘telepatina’), and the ability to leave their bodies and arrive at their destination without crossing the intervening space. They were particularly fond of going to New York, where there were millions of boxes that moved by themselves, and huge termite mounds where people lived like ants in vast colonies. It was those travellings through the noosphere that persuaded them that they never wanted to leave the jungle, where life was very easy, as there was no routine whatsoever and one never did anything at all unless one felt like it.

They lived in very large chozas which contained upwards of thirty people each, and also the animals that they took to bed with them for warmth at night. The husbands’ hammocks were above their wives’, which were above their children’s, and after dark they would block the low entrances to the hut and keep logs smouldering so that a homely atmosphere of impenetrable smoke was created. There was also a communal hut used for some parts of ceremonies and for councils, and the huts were always laid out in the shape of the crescent moon, which they believed to be made of oropendola feathers. When the time came to leave a village because the soil was exhausted, they sometimes left their household possessions behind in order not to have to carry them; otherwise the women carried them, as they were considered to be the owners.