The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (3 page)

Existing in a world almost wholly unrelated to that of all other classes were the Indians. One half of them, the Incas, lived almost exclusively at altitudes greater than two thousand
metres. At all such altitudes they reckoned, accurately, that almost no one would bother to come and look for them. Thus they lived peacefully in their carefully built grass huts, tending their terraces, chewing coca leaves, worshipping Pachacamac, and coming back to the plains solely in order to sell mochilas (their very practical and beautifully decorated carrying bags with a shoulder strap), and potatoes. If you were to see a particularly fine mule, it would always have with it a particularly fine Indian dressed in a white tunic, with a white domed hat set upright on a shining black head of hair. It was not so much their Mongolian features that impressed everyone, although these were both beautiful and impressive, but their sandals made from car tyres and the phenomenal muscularity of their calves. Most of them carried muskets in perfect working order which had been taken from the Spaniards centuries before, and on account of this, and because it was commonly said that all Indians had syphilis, everyone left them alone. The government was dimly aware that they were a species of national monument, and appointed officers to ensure their protection and preservation, who, fortunately, did nothing to earn their salaries. Thus the noble people lived on undisturbed, except by the not infrequent crashes of army helicopters, the inoffensive and almost unnoticeable visits of diffident anthropologists from Oxford and Cambridge, and the straggling parties of mountaineers with peeling noses and diarrhoea who also came for the most part, and perhaps curiously enough, from Britain. It should surprise no one if in two thousand years there are still Acahuatecs and Arahuacax sucking coca pounded with snail shells from their pestles at altitudes greater than seven thousand feet in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita; for they are a people who have learned by their own blood the wondrous disadvantages of an eventful history.

The other half of the Indian population occupied the jungle regions below the foothills, and although the one population graduated into the other, they were quite different in appearance and way of life.

Slightly above the Negros but not wholly so was the class of mestizos and mulattos. These people of different racial mix were perhaps physically the most surprising of all the peoples in that land for whilst they all possessed the broadish nose and frizzy hair of the Negro, sometimes the hair was blonde, or ginger, and sometimes the eyes were blue, or green, or amber. Their skins were pale yellow, and most faces would have one or two dark brown beauty spots. Perhaps some of them were sallow-complexioned thanks to the many preparations one could buy for whitening the skin, for in lands where power is not in the hands of the majority, the masses invariably adopt the snobberies and prejudices of the rulers, as if to say, ‘Look, I am not one of the oppressed; I, too, am superior.’ From the mestizo class was being born an embryonic petit bourgeoisie who lived in the suburbs of the bigger towns, who bought televisions which received only the confused flickerings of the transmitters in the capital. The signal, having been bounced from peak to peak over hundreds of miles so that all the wavelengths were cancelled out by interfering with themselves, would arrive at sets powered by anything between one hundred and three hundred volts, depending upon the vagaries of the public generating system or their own generators. One could walk down the streets of Valledupar at night and see through the windows mestizo families peering intently at the bright square of leaping and buzzing lines and spots as though they were interpreting runes or the flight of birds. When by some freak of atmospheric conditions a picture appeared or a line of speech was discernible, there would follow a minute of animated discussion and comment from the family and the mother and the oldest sister would come in from the kitchen, and then they would return, leaving the family to gaze hypnotised once more by the scrambled and undecipherable traces of old cowboy films,
The Flintstones
, the usual nonsense from the USA, and advertisements for skin-whitener.

The pallid mulattas provided the country’s most industrious because most popular prostitutes, for from a white’s point of view they were sufficiently black for them to be exotic, and
congress with them to be naughty without being too shocking. From a black’s point of view they were sufficiently white for them to be exotic, and congress with them to be something of an honour. To mestizo men, mulatta women were of course absolutely ordinary, so they frequented the black brothels, which were sufficiently exotic and naughty for such visits to be satisfactory. White prostitutes did not exist, but if they had, they would have been immensely popular, tired, and rich, and no doubt many blacks and mestizos would have been trampled to death in the rush every Saturday night.

To say that there were no white whores is, on reflection, a little misleading, for I have yet to come to the Spanish aristocracy which constituted the oligarchy, whose daughters were out for nothing but to marry the richest man they could find in order that they could live the idlest and most fatuous lives possible. These virtuous ladies of course gave their doting husbands as little congress as possible for their money, thus driving them into the arms of those women who were somewhat less chaste, virtuous and untouchable. It would be impossible to describe what manifold and formidable maladies the ladies of the rich could feign. They pined away for the most part in exquisitely refined boredom alleviated only by the careful and repeated perusal of risque and romantic novels which they paid their maids to buy for them from shops with fat, sweaty and balding proprietors who put on literary airs. Thus these ladies lived life at one remove from everything that makes the world interesting and exciting, and sought each other’s company as if by gravitational force in order to create rumours and spread scandals which nearly always ended unfortunately, since unsuspecting husbands found themselves dragged in to defend family honour over slights and fabrications upon which lawyers grew rich, and which could even lead to assassinations by highly-paid professionals known as jaguncos.

The oligarchy was a large network of immensely rich landowners, descended from the conquistadores, who had been illiterate robber barbarians who had destroyed entire civilisations in the name of Jesus, the Virgin, the Catholic kings, and
gold. In this way they ensured a perpetual sinecure in paradise for their immortal souls, and perpetual admiration from generations of schoolchildren who were taught in history lessons of their magnificent and daring exploits against the pagan savages whose phenomenal towns and monuments one can still see today (in ruins).

The oligarchy were of course all related to each other by marriage and by self-interest, now more than ever after La Violencia. During this period, which had lasted ten years, two factions of the oligarchy had conducted an unprecedentedly bloody campaign of violence against each other in which perhaps three hundred thousand souls perished at the hands of jaguncos and guerrillas, both of whom accrued so much money that it amounted to a redistribution of wealth that was almost significant.

The oligarchy was divided into liberals and conservatives, who were united in their terror of communism after the success of the Cuban revolution, especially as many of them had had interests in the brothels and casinos of Havana; others had had interests in pharmaceutical companies which manufactured drugs to cure the diseases spread by the former, and some in supplying guns to be used by gangs struggling for control of the latter. However, the liberals and conservatives differed over how to combat the spread of such appalling beliefs as ‘equality’, ‘fair pay’ and ‘democracy’. The conservatives believed in coming down hard on them; this involved being curt with your campesinos, keeping them illiterate, and paying them a fixed wage of one hundred and fifty pesos a week. The liberals on the other hand believed in being jolly with your campesinos, teaching them to read bits of paper with instructions on them, and paying them a fixed wage of one hundred and fifty pesos a week. In this way they hoped that the peasants would become too contented to bother to be communists. The whole situation became infinitely confused by the conservatives’ habit of describing the liberals as ‘communists’.

Eventually, in an historic feat of compromise, democracy was restored by the abolition of elections, and the two parties agreed
to rule alternately for four year periods, thus postponing La Violencia indefinitely.

As peace settled once again, the oligarchy returned to its old pursuits of appointing its oldest sons to high office in the state, its second sons to high office in the church, and the rest of its sons to high office in the armed forces. Meanwhile some of the peasants almost became communist without even having heard the word.

Dona Constanza Evans, with whom our digression began, and with whom it now finishes, was a conservative, being a direct descendant, like all aristocrats, of a particularly brutal and successful barbarian. Her husband, Don Hugh Evans, was in fact the descendant of a nineteenth-century Welsh speculator, and was still officially a British citizen. Consequently his two sons went to Harrow, where they became fairly muscly in the legs and extremely Anglophile, apparently under the illusion that Harrovians were representative of the English as a whole. Naturally they felt very much at home amongst such civilised people.

Dona Constanza sent for her foreman to instruct him to dig a canal, and sent a message to Profesor Luis which read, ‘Did Tchaikovsky or Beethoven die of cholera or typhus?’

WHEN FEDERICO CREPT
away from his father’s adobe house with the rifle and the two boxes of shells it cannot be said that it was with any clear idea in his head of what he was going to do or how he was to do it. All that there actually was in his head was a kind of astonished outrage and a relentless determination to do something spectacular by way of vengeance. He had frequently witnessed bloodshed in his short life, but what he had just witnessed in the village was of a different kidney from machete fights over a woman or an insult, or the gruesome amputations of snake-bitten limbs, or even the incomprehensible agony of his mother when giving birth to Francesca, which he had watched from the corner of the hut with a sense of desperate awe. The difference was that all the violence and pain be had seen hitherto had seemed to have a point to it, and whilst it was regrettable, it had never been spurious, and had therefore not been shocking. The carnage accompanying Capitan Rodrigo Figueras’ little exploit, and the subsequent hysteria, triggered into life that sense of moral anger and disgust that hitherto Federico had only experienced the glimmer of, when Profesor Luis blamed him for something he had not done. Secondly, the campesino has a most rigid sense of honour, the most precious and prized possession of those who have next to nothing, and which is the one public and personal voice which must at all
times be obeyed without question, even beyond common sense and death. It is honour that will cause a man to spend thirty years not talking to his favourite brother or his son because of an affront, or to starve for a year in order to pay a debt or keep a promise. It is honour that will spur men to the most futile, heroic, and stupid extremes out of bravado and machismo, and it is as though they have never heard that the days of Tirant lo Blanc and Don Quixote are long dead. This kind of honour is an exclusively male preserve, for the women of these lands have a code of honour which is infinitely tempered by compassion, humour, and common wisdom, which has nothing to do with those irrational, dogmatic absolutes of the male which provoke him either to astonishingly fine feats of valour or the most depressingly fatuous feats of unfathomable insanity. Sometimes these are inextricably mixed up together, and one would not know whether to weep with despair or to weep with admiration. Capitan Figueras, for example, probably had thrown his grenade out of injured honour, for he had been comprehensively dishonoured and humiliated by a hunter with a musket, a man who looked like a conquistador with a revolver, and a whore with a machete.

Federico on the other hand had lost his uncle Juanito, he had seen his teacher beaten to the ground with a rifle by a repulsive fat officer, his cousin Farides nearly violated, and his own dog had been so badly mutilated that his father, Sergio, had been obliged to shoot it between the eyes with the very rifle he was now carrying away like a kidnapped baby. Federico therefore had a most personal reason for wishing death upon the Capitan, who was in the army, which was in the employ of the state. It is surely true that ultimately all campesino revolutionaries are motivated in the first place not by ideals or economic theories, but by a deeply felt sense of offended dignity. But even if this were not generally the case, it was certainly true of Federico, who would only learn to hate the whole army, the state, and the United States which propped it up long after he took to the hills in order to live wild and ruminate over his plans for retribution and the satisfaction he would feel in exacting it.

At this point he was still a one-boy revolution with a large part of him consisting of a mush of romantic impossibilities. It had not occurred to him that he could not kill every officer in the army just to ensure that he got Figueras, nor had he thought he would miss the cheerful, anarchic poverty of village life, the bright eyes of Francesca, or the corralling of the ceibu steers at market time. He thought of himself as an heroic avenging angel of death, not as a wandering boy with a rifle that would bruise his shoulder every time he fired it, with nothing else but a mochila filled with bocadillos wrapped in palm leaves, three avocado pears, and two boxes of shells.

By the time that dawn had launched the red sun rapidly above the mountains, Federico was in a humbler frame of mind than he had been at two o’clock that morning. He had walked several miles, it is true, past the hacienda of the gringo with the aeroplane, and he was already near the jungle before the foothills of the Cordillera where the ground is half in patches of lush verdancy and half in stony waste, sprouting with the lunar columns built by termites; but he had been startled by every whistle and rustle of every creature that had crossed his footsteps. He started and sweated with fear each time he came face to face with the enormous silhouette of a steer, or a rock, and he imagined that every glimmer of moonlight on his path was a coral snake rearing to strike. In addition the sling of the rifle was already wearing a sore on his shoulder, and the magazine constantly thumped the same spot above his kidneys as he stumbled through the darkness. The Lee Enfield also seemed to be growing heavier, but he clung to it doggedly, and when there was sufficient light he sat on a rock and caressed its stock in much the same mood of tenderness and exaltation as that he had dreamed he would feel when first caressing a woman.