The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (17 page)

Remedios stood up slowly and hesitantly handed him the gun, butt first. The General took it and looked at it. He passed it from one hand to the other, as though weighing it.

‘This is a military pistol,’ he said, looking up at Remedios. ‘I suppose the original owner is dead.’

Remedios smiled, ‘No, he left it behind when he ran away.’

The General smiled gently and looked around him, as if to say farewell to the world and all its pain and beauty. He glanced up at the sun. ‘It is a fine day to die,’ he said, ‘I am very glad it is not raining.’

He raised the pistol and pointed it towards the roof of Remedios’ hut. The men, as of one mind, raised their weapons and aimed them at him, all thinking that he was about to try to shoot his way out. The General smiled gently again, closed his eyes, and placed the gun against his temple. He stood there for a few seconds, and the men watched in horrified fascination as his finger slowly took up first pressure. Then his eyes opened
suddenly and he said, ‘Forgive me, I have forgotten to make confession. I wish to confess to Father Garcia, I cannot die an unhallowed death.’

Everyone was both relieved and annoyed. ‘Garcia,’ snapped Remedios, ‘confess him, but be quick, before the sun kills all of us.’

On his knees, the General said, ‘Father, forgive me, for I have sinned. I have thought and done evil things . . .’

‘Under the circumstances, I think you can spare the details,’ said Garcia, and with his finger he made the sign of the cross upon the forehead of the General.
‘Absolvo te.
Go my child and sin no more.’ He bent down and whispered in the General’s ear, ‘Stay there.’

He walked off purposefully towards his hut, and the General remained kneeling in the sun, his head bowed. A moment later Garcia reappeared with a maize tortilla, a tin mug, and a bottle. He made the sign of the cross with his index finger and forefinger over the tortilla, muttered some words, and broke a little piece off. He placed it softly on the General’s tongue. ‘The body of Christ, which is given for you. Eat this in remembrance of me.’ The General withdrew his tongue and swallowed the bread with difficulty. Some of the men crossed themselves.

Garcia poured some cane rum from the bottle into the tin mug, and blessed it with the sign of the cross. He tipped the mug against the General’s lips and said, ‘The blood of Christ which was shed for you. Drink this in remembrance of me.’ Again, some of the men crossed themselves. Garcia placed his hand a little above the General’s head, and the General distinctly felt a kind of healing warmth come from it. Garcia prayed a moment, and then looked down at the General. ‘Die in peace,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Father.’ The General rose to his feet and placed them firmly apart. Once more he closed his eyes and slowly raised the weapon to his temple. Firmly he took up first pressure, and Garcia signalled frantically to Remedios that she should stop him. She shook her head vehemently.

General Fuerte pulled the trigger, remembering his training all those years ago. ‘Squeeze, don’t snatch! Squeeze, don’t
snatch!’ He remembered the little corporal who had drilled them in weapons training. ‘This is the hammer, this is the chamber, this is the breech-block. The weapon must be kept scrupulously clean or it may jam or the barrel may burst and blow your balls off. I shall inspect your weapons every day, and if they are not as clean as a nun’s underwear I shall blow your balls off myself!’

The General’s soul was already halfway out of his body when it jerked back again. Nothing had happened, except for a click. He looked at the gun in puzzlement, and flicked back the release catch. As the men burst out of their silence into wondering chatter, he opened the gun and looked into the revolving chamber.

He looked at Remedios reproachfully. ‘It is empty. You have put me through all this for nothing. Why did you do this?’

‘I am not a barbarian, and I have no wish to see anyone blow their own head off.’ She smiled. ‘Also, I am not an idiot, I’m not the kind of fool who bangs a loaded revolver on the table with the barrel pointing straight at myself, nor would I hand it loaded to a prisoner. Kindly credit me with a little intelligence.’

The General smiled wryly, and Remedios took the gun back from him and banged it on the table. ‘I want you all to go and sit in the shade somewhere and discuss whether the verdict is guilty or not guilty. You will come back here after siesta and tell the court your decision. Do not forget to appoint a foreman.’

The men trooped off to the shade of a huge caracolee tree and fell into hot discussion. General Fuerte turned to Garcia as the priest led him back to the hut that served as his very insecure prison. ‘That cane rum tasted foul. I nearly choked.’

Garcia smiled. ‘The taste of blood is not good either, my friend. Remember it was blood you drank.’

‘It was sweet to be about to die,’ replied the General. ‘I will always remember that.’

When the court reconvened the General was brought out again. ‘What is your decision?’ demanded Remedios from the foreman, an ex-tractor-driver from Asuncion.

‘We decided sort-of-guilty and sort-of-not-guilty,’ he said, grinning with embarrassment and scratching his head.

Remedios raised her eyes to heaven and tapped her fingers on the table. ‘That is not helpful,’ she enunciated slowly, emphasising the ‘not’.

‘It is our decision,’ said the foreman, more bravely. ‘He
is
sort of guilty and also sort of not guilty, so that had to be our verdict. But we don’t want you to shoot him. Tiene cojones. We don’t want a man who is brave to die like a dog.’

‘In that case,’ announced Remedios, ‘I will pass sentence.’ She turned to look at the General, who had listened to the foreman with one eyebrow raised. ‘General Fuerte, you have been found “sort of guilty” and also “sort of not guilty”. For the “sort of not guilty” I disallow a capital sentence. For the “sort of guilty” I sentence you to be detained by us until I think what to do with you. The court is finished. We have to prepare for the return of Gloria, Tomas, Rafael and Gonzago with another captive. The General will have company.’

Remedios indicated to two men to return her desk and chair to her hut, and then she turned to the General and approached him. ‘What do you think of the verdict, General? It is not one you would hear in a “real” court, is it?’

The General smiled and passed his hand above his eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But maybe they are right. I realise that I have done nothing wrong. I have always done my best, with good conscience. If I am guilty it is because I have not done enough.’

‘Know thyself,’ said Remedios, placing her hand on his shoulder.

The General laughed ironically; ‘I do not think I will ever have the opportunity to do enough, anyway.’

‘I might ransom you,’ said Remedios.

AT THE SAME
that General Fuerte was being tried for crimes against civilisation, and at the same time that Comandante, or rather Colonel (as he was now) Figueras was setting out with a battalion of men from Valledupar, four guerrilleros from Remedios’ group were descending from the mountains with a very special mission, and Dona Constanza was again reading her three-year-old copy of
Vogue.
For all of these people the heat was stupendously oppressive and all conversation was restricted to the repetition of a single phrase, ‘Ay, el calor!’ The four guerrilleros hurried from the shade of one tree to the next and from one stream to another for a drink. The soldiers jolted along in the back of the lorries, their heads hanging miserably, their foreheads cascading with sweat. It ran down their arms and into the mechanisms of their M.16s; it ran prickling and tingling from their crotches down into their boots; it formed crosses on their backs which grew into soaking dark sodden patches on their shirts, which then dried into salt about the edges; it ran down from their hair into their eyes so that there was not one of them who did not squint against the stinging and shake their head and blink. When the lorries stopped for the men to urinate, the urine was the darkest yellow and pungent, and some found they had no water left in them with which to micturate.

In her hacienda Dona Constanza instructed her maid to bring her a huge jug of lemon juice sweetened with panela and cooled with ice. Then the maid was dismissed and Dona Constanza removed her towel and lay suffering and naked beneath the slowly rotating fan. She put down the copy of
Vogue
because the sight of all those tight clothes made her feel all the more unbearably hot, and she, like all the nation, oligarch and peasant alike, lay stricken and hopeless in the state of necessary torpor that makes siesta the only refuge of the sane.

If the rest of the world does not always need a siesta, it does always need money, and Remedios’ group was no exception. Indeed, the thing which is frequently most galling to good Communist guerrillas is that they have to trade with capitalists, and become capitalists themselves in order to fund the revolution. More often than not, they are obliged to pay gunrunners in the hated yanqui dollar – contrary to popular myth, the USSR has given no direct aid since 1964 and the many groups that fund themselves by means of the drug trade are obliged to demand payment in dollars in order to buy the guns. In this case the revolutionaries at least have the satisfaction of knowing that the cocaine paid for in dollars goes straight to the hated USA and eats away at the lives of its citizens and its social fabric. Thus it becomes the victim of the strength of its own currency, and as Lenin said, often quoted by Remedios, ‘The capitalists will sell us the weapons with which we will destroy them.’

Connected closely with this irony is another, namely that in order to secure peace, justice, and a better distribution of wealth, revolutionaries must prosecute war, perpetrate injustices and immoralities, and appropriate cash and goods from those whose interests they may have at heart – the ordinary people who cannot afford it. Like most groups, that of Remedios issued receipts for all goods appropriated, to be redeemed after the victory. Most of the people could not read these receipts, and those that could did not know what to do with them. In some places that had been cleaned out of pesos these receipts became a substitute for currency, their value depending upon the
amount of writing upon them, so that one could hear such remarks as ‘I paid fourteen words for this machete’, or ‘One word for four mangoes’. People being raided by guerrillas would beg their raiders to write their receipts in even greater detail; this caused, however, a kind of word-inflation and the guerrillas eventually ran out of the good will to write them. Nonetheless, the receipts of the various guerrilla groups, even though they were interchangeable, never achieved a status equal to Pancho Villa’s amazing feat in the Mexican revolution of 1913 – that is, entirely supplanting the federal currency.

There comes a time when the revolutionary conscience becomes troubled by revolutionary justice, and the revolutionaries try something that actually affects those against whom they struggle – the establishment and the oligarchy.

Thus it was that four of the People’s Vanguard crashed through the door of Dona Constanza’s hacienda as she lay stark naked and torpid beneath the fan. Dona Constanza sat bolt upright, emitting little shrieks, her hands flitting from one part of her body to another in an effort to cover herself.

The four guerrillas lowered their weapons and stood goggle-eyed and gaping before the spectacle. ‘Madre de Dios!’ exclaimed Tomas. Rafael giggled nervously and wanted to make a dirty remark without being able to think of one, and Gonzago, in an absurdly formal tone of voice, said, ‘Good afternoon,’ whereupon Rafael giggled again. Gloria snorted with amusement, bent down, handed Dona Constanza her towel, and said, ‘Callate!’ sharply to Rafael. ‘Basta ya!’

‘Perdone,’ said Rafael, still chortling, ‘but I find this very humorous.’

‘I do not!’ exclaimed Dona Constanza.

‘One day you will see the funny side of it,’ Gloria attempted to console her.

‘I doubt it. Now get out of my house or I will call the police.’

‘How?’ said Tomaso, looking genuinely puzzled. ‘We went round the house twice looking for a telephone-wire in order to cut it. You do not have a telephone. No one has a telephone around here.’

‘Perhaps she is telepathic with the police chief in Valledupar,’ commented Gonzago.

‘He has no thoughts for anyone to read,’ said Rafael.

‘Shut up all of you!’ ordered Gloria, and she turned to Dona Constanza. ‘You must get dressed in something very practical. We are taking you hostage against a ransom of half a million dollars. Behave and we will treat you with respect. Misbehave and we will shoot you. It is simple.’

‘But,’ replied Dona Constanza, her eyes wide with astonishment, ‘he would never pay it!’

‘Does he not love you?’ asked Tomas, genuinely concerned.

‘Quiet Tomas!’ said Gloria. ‘He will have to pay it or he will be shot some other time.’ She took from the breast pocket of her khaki shirt the receipt book. ‘You will write a letter to your husband which we will dictate to you.’

Dona Constanza, her lip and her hands trembling, and her eyes brimming with tears, took down the following note:

Underneath Gloria wrote, ‘Respected Sir, this is witnessed by Gloria de Escobal and hereto I append my signature. Gloria de Escobal.’

Gloria escorted Dona Constanza to her dressing room and ensured, against the latter’s protests, that she dressed in the toughest and most practical clothes and shoes, took no more than two pairs of underwear and two shirts, and nothing else.