The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (26 page)

Inside the room Admiral Fleta asked General Ramirez a question. ‘Do you think you can rely on him?’

‘I think so,’ replied the General. ‘To begin with I am having him tailed by the Army Internal Security Service, and if he does not take his duties seriously he will be taken off them.’

‘And posted to Antarctica?’ asked Air Chief Marshal Sanchis. The other two laughed.

The Colonel found it much easier than he had expected. He consulted the files of the Army Internal Security Service and found that there were two categories: ‘C’ for ‘Communistas’ and ‘SV’ for ‘Subversivos varios’. The Colonel was stupefied by the number of files. There were hundreds of thousands of them, and he thought, ‘Everything must be worse than I thought.’

Being a military man, and therefore a lover of order and system, he decided to start at the beginning of A and simply work his way through. He decided to ignore for the time being everyone who was living outside the capital, and he photocopied the first fifty files and took them home. On his way he bought a very large office diary and a business pack of postcards. He bought a child’s printing set and composed the following standard message:

The next day he hired a secretary and delegated to her all the responsibility for arranging interviews, sending off the postcards and acting as receptionist. He spent the first week putting his office in order and practising his interview technique with the aid of a mirror and a tape recorder.

In the second week the subversivos varios began to arrive
and wait nervously in the waiting room, wondering what they had done wrong and what the interview was for.

The Colonel would interview four people in the morning and four in the afternoon, except Friday afternoon when he would write his report to General Ramirez. He felt at the end of two weeks that he was getting nowhere, and he was already bored and frustrated.

The interviewee would sit fidgeting nervously, and the Colonel would look up from the file at the student, or the housewife, or the social worker, or whoever it was and say, ‘It says here that during the playing of the National Anthem it was observed that you failed to stand up/continued talking/laughed disrespectfully,’ or he would find himself saying, ‘It was observed during a Trade Union Meeting that you laughed derisively at a joke about the Navy.’

The frightened student/housewife/social worker would make lame/frightened excuses (‘I’d hurt my leg’, ‘the other person asked me a question’, ‘my boyfriend was tickling me’). The Colonel would frown very severely and sigh disapprovingly. The interviewee would become even more nervous, and the Colonel would stand up and walk around the room, and demand to know about subversion and subversives.

The interviewee would look confused and say, ‘I do not know anything,’ and the Colonel would give them a stern lecture on their patriotic duty. Cowed and unhappy, the victims of his speeches would hurry away, and he would sigh and shake his head and think, ‘What was the point of all that?’

He grew excessively irritable and began to lose his temper more and more quickly as his interviewees failed to provide him with anything interesting or exciting, but he managed to control himself until one day he interviewed a radical lawyer.

The man wore round John Lennon glasses, he had greasy long hair, he had spots among his stubble, and the Colonel thought he probably had no muscles at all. The Colonel felt that irrational fear and hatred that most military men have of people whom they suspect are homosexuals. The man put the Colonel’s back up before he even spoke, with his bohemian necktie, his waistcoat from a charity shop, and his sandals.

The lawyer came in and sat down without being asked, looked at the Colonel with a kind of contemptuous and expectant impertinence, and started to roll a cigarette.

‘You may not smoke in here,’ said the Colonel brusquely, ‘I detest it.’ Slowly and casually the radical lawyer put the cigarette to his mouth and lit it. The Colonel snatched it from between his lips and crushed it beneath his boot.

‘I hope you realise that I only came out of curiosity,’ said the radical lawyer. ‘There is no law at all which says I had to come.’

‘I want to ask you some questions,’ said the Colonel. ‘This is nothing to do with the law. It’s a question of co-operation.’

‘And what happens if I don’t “co-operate”?’ asked the lawyer, lounging back in his chair.

The Colonel did not answer. He picked up the file; it said, ‘The suspect makes a policy of defending in court anti-social elements and subversives.’

‘You defend left-wingers?’ asked the Colonel.

‘I have the right not to answer questions if my own lawyer is not present. In fact, if I have not been arrested or charged I don’t have to answer any questions anyway – I want to know your name, Colonel.’

‘You want to know my name?’ asked the Colonel incredulously. ‘You?’

‘My organisation finds the names of militarist pigs and we report their activities to the Human Rights Movement, and the UN of course.’

The Colonel was stunned. ‘You called me “cochino”?’

‘Cochino,’ repeated the lawyer. ‘It is a word that applies to the type of Latino-Nazi of which you are a specimen. Nazi is spelt
N
–
A
–
Z
–
I
and cochino is spelt
C
–
O
–
C
–
H
–
I
–
N
–
O
if you want to write the words in your illegal report. I assume you’d like to learn to spell.’

The rage and frustration of two weeks’ futile effort boiled over in the Colonel. He strode up to the lawyer and grasped him by the unbuttoned lapels of his waistcoat. He hauled him out of the chair and flung him against the wall, so that his head hit it with a crack.

The lawyer groaned, recollected himself, and then sneered, ‘So force is the only language a pig understands?’

The Colonel drew back his fist and crushed the man’s nose so that blood streamed down his chin. He wiped it with the back of his hand and said, ‘You prove my point.’

‘You have made no points,’ shouted the Colonel. ‘You are a disgusting little queer who thinks he’s important. You have called me a pig and a Nazi! What else would you call me?’

‘Fascista!’ replied the lawyer.

The Colonel punched the man hard in the stomach, and he collapsed on the floor groaning and doubling up. The Colonel, raging with contempt and disgust, kicked the man hard in the kidneys twice, and then dragged him across the floor and out into the corridor. He opened the door of one of the little rooms that used to be for visiting officers, and threw the lawyer inside. As the man groaned and moaned on the floor the Colonel said, ‘When you can talk to me with some respect in a civilised manner, then I will let you go.’

The Colonel was shaking with rage and indignation when he sat down at his table and tried to prepare himself for the next interview. In spite of himself he shouted at the young woman and made her cry.

Two hours later the man was banging on his door, shouting, ‘I need to go to the toilet!’

The Colonel listened from his office and the rage rose up in him again. He strode to the door of the man’s room and said in a voice full of disgust, ‘You can damn well piss youself.’

When the Colonel drove angrily home that night in his State Telephone Company Ford Falcon, the radical lawyer was still in his cell, unfed, pissing in the corner of the room.

EVERYTHING IN URUGUAY
had traditionally been exceedingly staid and tedious. The country had been run for years by two parties of the centre, the Colorados and the Blancos, which commanded hereditary loyalties rather like the Whigs and the Tories in eighteenth-century Britain. However, any differences in their policies were only vaguely discernible. The situation was analogous to that in Colombia, with its Liberals and Conservatives.

However, things had begun to change when dozens of enthusiastic splinter parties began to proliferate in the universities, where the more or less idle children of the upper and middle classes had ample time and money to become disillusioned with everything and talk endlessly through the night of how it all had to be changed. Gloria de Escobal, whose father was an ambassador, oscillated between joining the Frente Amplio and the Party For The Victory Of The People, and finally opted for the latter, even though it was very much smaller.

Gloria was twenty-five years old, had been educated at Roedean in Brighton, England, and had married a man with so much money that she had had nothing to do except fly to Buenos Aires to go shopping or go to Punto del Este and lie in the sun. In the winter she would usually go to Italy.

She bore her husband a son and then announced that she wanted to go to university. Her husband and family protested, but she went anyway, and her husband did not finally divorce her until her left-wing associations became too embarrassing and dangerous. With the permission of Gloria’s parents he abducted the child and then won legal custody in the courts, so Gloria decided to have another child on her own, whose father was an irrelevance.

Gloria was not a member of the Tupamaros guerrillas, but because of their activities it very soon became uncomfortable to be left wing at all. The placid government of the centre found itself, as did the entire country, whirling on its heels in confusion and indecision wondering where the next grenade was going to come from and who was going to be assassinated next. The Tupamaros thought that throwing cobblestones like the students of Paris was effeminate and ineffective, but were as surprised as anyone else when the exasperated military seized power and repressed the whole country barbarously for eleven years.

Gloria de Escobal’s little party was still technically legal, but she began to notice that familiar faces were going missing, and she began to hear stories of torture and murder. She packed up her possessions, gathered her baby in her arms, and moved to Argentina. She settled in a very expensive flat in Belgrano, Buenos Aires, and lived comfortably enough on money sent by her father and on what she earned as a secretary.

She tried to persuade the armed men who abducted her to let her keep her baby with her, but they told her it would be taken care of and she had to leave it in the flat alone, even though it was only one year old. Gloria’s father was told that the baby was with Gloria in prison. Gloria was told that the baby was with her father. The baby was taken to Santiago de Chile and dumped in a public toilet. The men also took her possessions and sold them for their own profit.

Gloria was taken blindfolded to the Ondetti Engineering Works, recently gone into liquidation, and its buildings empty except for prisoners. Gloria heard the metal doors close behind
her and was pushed down the metal steps into the basement. She was blindfolded for two weeks and was not allowed to speak, but she was astonished when she realised from the whisperings of the guards that they, and all the prisoners, were also Uruguayans.

Gloria was fed three times over the fortnight and did not sleep at all because of the screaming and because the torturers used to put on record players very loudly to try to drown the cries of agony. Sometimes they tortured the prisoners in groups, and sometimes Gloria was taken out alone.

Compared to the Argentinian torturers the Uruguayans were very civilised. All that they did to Gloria was to bind her wrists behind her back with piano wire and then string her up by them from a beam, with her feet in a tank of salted water. Then they gave her electric shocks all over her body, but mostly of course on her breasts and genitals. They were supposed to ask her about other Uruguayans in exile in Argentina, and about left-wing activists she knew of in Uruguay, but usually they forgot.

Gloria was lucky that she only lost the use of her arms for a few weeks and was taken to a military airfield to be flown to Montevideo where she was imprisoned without being tortured or murdered. This was because the Argentinians, in a further exemplary case of international Inter-Intelligence Service Cooperation, had told them of a wonderful idea for legitimising her captivity.

The group who had been brought back from Buenos Aires were bundled into a lorry and taken to the Villa Maravillosa, where they were herded into a room, and remained there handcuffed whilst the army filled it with rifles and ammunition.

When the television cameras arrived the prisoners’ hoodwinks were taken off and they were led out of the Villa Maravillosa in single file and in handcuffs. Then the TV crews were brought into the Villa and shown the terrorists’ enormous cache of arms.

As Gloria was now a prisoner officially her father, the ambassador, was able to pull strings to get her out. The prison
psychiatrist in return for certain inducements diagnosed her as having been temporarily insane and under the influence of brainwashing, and she was released on the understanding that she should leave Uruguay and that her father was to be held personally responsible for her future conduct.

Childless and homeless, Gloria wandered those parts of Latin-America which would still allow her in, until she met Remedios in Mexico City, where the latter was trying to recruit exiled Montoneros for her guerrilla group at home in her own country. Gloria stopped being a theoretical communist who sympathised with the terrorists from a distance, and went back with Remedios to become a practising communist who actually was a terrorist.

Gloria dropped her upper-middle-class airs and attitudes in the mountains, but her aura of culture and conviction gave her a kind of concentrated self-confidence that the other guerrilleros respected. It was tacitly understood that if anything ever happened to Remedios, Gloria would probably become the leader. She took Tomas as her lover, but never bore him a child because of the effects of the torture.