The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (2 page)

Consuelo looked indifferently at the vultures, and went
inside to straighten out the frizzes in her hair. She accepted uncritically that the more Spanish you looked, and the less like a Negro, the more the men would pay.

Hectoro’s mother was an Arahuacax Indian from the Sierra Nevada, but he looked like a conquistador, and consequently he had three wives who lived in separate mudblock houses four miles apart on the exact angles of an equilateral triangle so they would never meet and fight because they were jealous.

Hectoro was an intelligent and intolerant man who looked on life very simply. A man needs women – he had three; he needs shelter – he had three; he needs money – he was foreman on the gringo’s hacienda; he needs status – he had his own mule, a revolver in a holster, leather bombachos, he could rope a steer with infallible precision, and he could hold alcohol in his wiry frame like no man else. The doctor had told him he was to die of liver failure because of the drink, and truly his skin had become yellowed; but he was proud and fiery-tongued, and he had threatened to shoot the doctor, who had then changed his diagnosis to something less disagreeable.

Hectoro was so proud that he seldom spoke to anyone; indeed he openly despised everybody, especially the gringos for whom he worked. They respected him and put him in charge of everything, and they turned a blind eye when he nearly murdered a rustler by shooting him in the groin. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘I turned the son of a whore into a woman and found a job for him in the whorehouse. Let no man say I am not generous.’ Even those who hated him laughed and bought him drinks, and looked at him with the awe one has of a man who stalks death and would not mind dying, as long as it was over something important like a woman, or a mule, or an insult. On his left hand, his rein hand, he wore a black glove; in his mouth smouldered always a puro, a cool local cigar, and his eyes squinnied against the sun, against the smoke, against danger, against the vultures. He rode over to see if a steer had died.

At fifty years old, Pedro the hunter was an unusually old man.
He lived alone in the scrub-land by a pool of clear water with his ten carefully-trained mongrel hunting dogs. He was strong and lithe, and could stalk tirelessly for days without sleep or lapse of concentration. He walked so fast that a horse was entirely unnecessary, and everyone knows that horses will only eat good grass.

Pedro could trap any creature whatsoever. He could noose a caiman and let it grow huge in his pool, feeding it offal, until he could sell the skin for a few pesos so that some woman could buy an alligator handbag in New York for one thousand dollars. He could trap a boa constrictor with a forked stick and keep it until someone wanted one for magic. He could extract the venom of the coral snake for use in tiny doses as an aphrodisiac, or in heavy doses for murder. He knew how to stand in the river with a lantern, and spear fish more delicate than trout and twice the size, and he knew how to mutter secretos in a cow’s ear so that its ulcers would disappear.

Today he both mourned and celebrated. For two weeks he had marked the spoor of the tigre, the jaguar that had become a rogue and killed two donkeys without eating them. For five hundred pesos the gringo had hired him to bring back the skin, and he and his dogs had gone with his wired Spanish musket. The dogs cornered the jaguar beneath an escarpment, and Pedro had shot it clean through the eye so the skin was unspoiled. He skinned it and sold the skin to the gringo for five hundred pesos. It was a huge cat and it had fought bravely. Pedro celebrated his success and mourned for the beautiful rare cat and for the two hunting dogs it had killed.

In the hacienda the gringo swigged back a glass of Glenfiddich and turned to his tight-lipped, unhappy wife.

‘I should get a fortune for that on the black market.’

‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ she said.

It was early on Friday evening when Capitan Rodrigo Jose Figueras and several jeeps turned up with the whores and the men of the platoon, the men to swagger and bully, and the whores to fulfil the regular trade. No one liked the soldiers, and
some men said they would not go to a whore who had had a soldier in her. ‘They are worse than gringos, because they try to be gringos when they are not. I spit on them.’

As the day cooled and the alcohol warmed, the tension lessened and hundreds of peasants arrived on muleback to get away from their women, their labour, their poverty, in order to forget and to live it up a little. The soldiers nearly stopped being soldiers, and even Figueras nearly forgot that he had been to the United States and had never really loved anyone.

But round about midnight, when Consuelo was already fully worn out and her concrete floor covered with cigarette ends and spittle, Capitan Rodrigo Figueras began to be bored and decided to go home to his tent by the river. He sent the Lieutenant and the Corporal to gather up the men, who cursed as they were dragged from the whorehouses and separated from their bottles. Formed up in a straggle in the dusty street, the Capitan made sure there were twenty-five men and ordered them to their jeeps.

Leaning against the leading jeep, Profesor Luis, twenty-two years old, and the gentlest man in the world, was tenderly kissing Farides, seventeen, and the loveliest girl in the whole district.

Figueras forced himself between them and thrust his stubbled face into that of Luis.

‘So,’ and the spittle spattered Luis’ shirt, ‘so, you son of a peasant bitch, you think you can grope your whore up against government property. I suppose you think you can spy on my jeep.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Luis, his eyes flickering. ‘I meant no harm, and she is not a whore. She is a virgin, and she is my fiancée.’

‘Would you marry her . . .’ and the Capitan coughed and spat and had to step back for balance, ‘if she was not a virgin and had been whored by twenty-five men?’

The soldiers looked at one another and smiled nervously, not sure whether to be horrified or delighted.

Profesor Luis wanted to shrink away, but he said, ‘I would defend her to the death. I shall go to the police.’

Figueras turned to the Corporal; ‘Show him who are the police.’

Profesor Luis crumpled as the rifle butt crunched into the back of his neck. Farides threw herself down on her hands and knees and wailed. The Capitan leaned forward and jerked her upright by the hair. ‘Tell us,’ he said, ‘that you are a little whore, and we will not feel obliged to turn you into one.’

A whore is a whore and has a whore’s honour. Farides was a virgin and hers was a virgin’s honour. They are both honour but they are separate and must not be confused. Her eyes bulged and rolled as the Capitan began to rotate his hand on her breast. She felt an urgent need to vomit, and her knees shook, but she said, ‘I am not a whore. I am the fiancée of Don Luis the Profesor.’

‘Take the little whore to the schoolhouse and prepare her,’ ordered the Capitan. They dragged her off, shrieking and writhing, and began to tear away her clothes. They slung her across the desk and pinned her down whilst she wept and pleaded and the Capitan finished his cigarette and thought of a new paintmark on his jeep.

He was about to crush the stub beneath his foot when in the doorway appeared Pedro with his Spanish musket, Hectoro with his revolver, and Consuelo the whore with a machete.

‘Capitan,’ said Hectoro, emphasising every word, ‘if you do not release the girl and leave this village immediately, your body will be fed to the caiman in Pedro’s pool and your men will be able to report that one stinking son of a diseased sow has ceased to serve himself and the yanquis and the pretence of a government!’

Sweat trickled down the temples of Capitan Rodrigo Jose Figueras, and a dark patch spread down the armpits and the back of his military shirt. He glared at Hectoro defiantly, but his lower lip quivered. ‘Vamos!’ he said to his men, and they filed out, almost apologetically. Farides turned on her side and whimpered until Consuelo the whore came in and covered her with a blanket and whispered words of comfort to her.

The jeeps roared away into the night, scattering the chickens
and raising a plume of dust. A shocked and indignant knot of people gathered in the street, and Farides emerged trembling, wrapped in her blanket. Shyly she kissed Hectoro and Pedro on the cheek, and then knelt down and cupped Profesor Luis’ head whilst somebody fetched some water.

One kilometre down the road, Capitan Rodrigo Figueras ordered his driver to stop and took something from a box on the back of the jeep. As he had been trained by the gringos in Panama, he slunk swiftly and noiselessly back along the track. He circled the huts through a maize field, and came out between two of the dwellings just next to the knot of people. He drew a pin from the grenade and lobbed it spinning into the crowd before he ducked away.

Three days later, the national radio issued a broadcast:

‘Three days ago a unit of government troops near Asuncion in Cesar surprised a group of communist insurgents and killed five of them, wounding twenty in a brief engagement. No troops were killed, and Capitan Rodrigo Figueras has been promoted to comandante and recommended for decoration. General Carlo Maria Fuerte, military commander in the area, said in an interview this morning that he and all units under him were deeply committed to, and would continue, the fight against the Cuba-led communist conspiracy to terrorise the free people of this country and subvert their liberties.’

It was on that same night that Federico, the fourteen-year-old who had shot the vulture for Profesor Luis, got out of his hammock at two o’clock in the morning, stole his father’s rifle and two boxes of shells and disappeared somewhere in the foothills that are neither quite in one country nor in its neighbour.

DONA CONSTANZA EVANS,
having risen from her silken sheets at ten o’clock when the air-conditioning had finally lost the daily battle against the heat and humidity of the equatorial morning, took a cool shower in water from her own purification plant, and towelled herself dry before the mirror. She possessed the gift of all spoiled women, that of being able to follow several inconsequential trains of thought simultaneously and to believe them all to be of incalculable importance. Thus she inspected her forty-year-old body according to the habit she had followed since puberty, and thought about the recent exploits of the army in the village, in which her groom had been killed by a fragment of grenade. She thought also of the problem of the swimming pool, which lost half its water, turned green with algae, and became full of grateful frogs during every dry season.

‘I do not know how I am expected to exercise in such a pool,’ she thought as she raised a plump but unprepossessing breast in order to dry beneath it. ‘It is long since I saw my navel unconcealed by this terrible fat – it is the price of children, and little good they do you at birth or after.’ As she dabbed at her face she paused suddenly: ‘Next time I am in the Estados Unidos I will make enquiries of operations so that I may be as young as I please. I had no idea Juanito was a communist. I
wonder if my two children caused my passage to expand – perhaps that is why Hugh no longer demands his rights of me at night. Still, if the army say he was a communist then he was a communist and he should have been killed as he was. No doubt Hugh has taken a woman – probably a campesina whore, they are all sluts. The army, after all, is trained by the yanquis, and so no doubt they know their job. I swear the skin of my thighs is becoming coarser. I should take a campesino lover, for preference a big shiny black Negro with muscles, or a mestizo, and see how Hugh likes that! Really the pool is an abomination; one could die of cholera like Tchaikovsky. Juanito would have been a fine lover if you saw him petting the horses. A man who has a way with animals has a way with a woman, so they say. Perhaps it was Beethoven.’ She parted her legs and dried herself there with more application than she had intended. ‘By the Virgin, I must be more careful with myself or I shall be burned away! I must find a new groom. Truly life is one hurdle after another, for it appears we are not born to happiness in this world. I wonder if it was typhus. I hear that there is such a thing as spontaneous combustion. It would be fortunate if there were a man or a maid with a bucket of water nearby. They say the fragment went through Juanito’s temple and destroyed his brain inside his head.’ She put a dainty foot on the mahogany chair to dry between the toes, looked up through the window (consisting in fact of fine anti-mosquito mesh, for even the Evanses were not stupid enough to have glass windows in such a climate), and admired the hundred or so pedigree horses of different varieties which grazed in the field. She was trying to spot her finest palomino when it occurred to her that she could divert the Mula. ‘I will dig a channel towards the purification plant from the river, and I will install some kind of gate to lower into the water so that it flows down the channel when it is required to do so. Moreover, I will not tell Hugh, or he will invent some reason to prevent it. I will pretend that it is a present to him for his birthday, and in this way when I go to New York I will not have to spend my allowance on a gift.’

Dona Constanza pouted alluringly to herself in the mirror
and thought suddenly of Juanito. A twinge of sadness and regret passed simultaneously behind her eyes and through her heart. But then she drew herself up and breathed deeply inwards, and the traces of the sixteen-year-old she once had been vanished from her face as the mantle of cold dignity settled itself about her. When she had dressed she emerged for breakfast every inch the Spanish aristocrat.

There were in that country, as in all those troubled countries, only four social groups to speak of. At the bottom of the social scale were the fourteen million Negroes who were directly descended from thirteen hundred slaves imported by the conquistadores to build the giant fortress of Nueva Sevilla after they had discovered that Indians made very inadequate slaves. They would not give up their gods and preferred to starve themselves to death rather than submit to indignity. The Negroes on the other hand, being from different parts of West Africa, had no common language, so it was a simple matter to confuse them and to brutalise them into being enlightened by Christianity. It is, after all, a consolation for present hell when one is promised future heaven, and their irrepressible humour and stoicism, along with their magnificent physiques and stature, enabled them to labour prodigiously under the whip and the brand. When the fortress was complete, and its dungeons well stocked with English pirates with royal patents from Queen Elizabeth, the slaves were released to fend for themselves. From these humble beginnings they emerged eventually as campesinos, the indispensable providers of nourishment for the entire nation. Consequently they were the poorest of all people and the most despised, even by themselves. Those who took to the favelas, the barrios, and the innumerable shanty-towns were driven by poverty and disease to theft, extortion, prostitution, violence and drink, and were therefore even more comprehensively reviled than the peasants, their brothers.