The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (31 page)

Everyone else was already awake, and Pedro said, ‘Will you take a copa?’ and he gave me a little cup of chacta, which is very powerful. It burned a hole in my stomach, but I instantly felt better. I said to Pedro, ‘So was my wife’s cancer natural, or are you going to tell me it was caused by evil spirits?’

He replied very gravely, ‘If you think for a minute, everything is natural, and everything is spirits.’

Mama! I can just see you crossing and re-crossing yourself as you read these words! But I have to tell you the wonderful news that in the week since then, Françoise’s cancer has gone into a very rapid remission, and that she is bright-eyed and happy for the first time in months! She tells me that she saw the same
things as myself, but that when I was unconscious she saw an angel, an hermaphrodite angel! She says it had a spear and a pair of scales, and that it kissed her on the mouth so she tingled all over. She is convinced it was the Archangel Raphael, but does not know why. Both Françoise and I are utterly ecstatic that she is getting better, as you may imagine. I was anticipating her death within a few weeks, and my heart was very heavy, which is now as light as a wren!

If that were not strange enough, we were afflicted immediately afterwards in this area with the most extraordinary plague, though I hasten to add that it is a benign one. You may have noticed (how could you help it?) that there are muddy paw marks on the paper, and that my handwriting is unusually erratic. This is because there has been a large black cat trying to sit on the paper as I write, which is also taking swipes at my pen as it moves. ‘What is so strange about that?’ I hear you say. ‘My son loves cats.’ What is so strange, Maman, is that we are absolutely inundated with a flood of cats of Biblical proportions. I cannot describe to you the sheer quantity of these animals that have appeared out of nowhere! They are sitting on fence-posts, on gates. They are draped voluptuously across roofs and branches, they are in my jeep, in the house, in the stable, in the fields. I cannot sit out at night as is my wont, because three or four cats instantly leap on my lap and on to my shoulders, and they also occupy Françoise’s hammock on the porch. I have to turn them out of my sink before I can wash my hands, and also out of the shower last thing at night. In the morning Françoise and I wake up stifled and sweating from the weight of cats on our bed, and sometimes they wake me by sticking their coarse little tongues in my ears and purring. I cannot tell you how tickly that is!

The odd thing is that I go around the house constantly shutting all the doors and windows, but they still appear and wrap themselves around my legs, as though they could walk through walls.

Another funny thing is that as yet they have not, despite their omnipresence, annoyed me at all. They are not the usual
mangy, flea-bitten and half-starved thieving little cats one normally sees around here, but are big and sleek, with fetching faces and charming demeanour. They do not steal food or dig up the garden or leave mouse-entrails all over the floor. Mostly they spend their time sitting on their haunches as though expecting something to happen, for which they are prepared to wait patiently. They are very affectionate, and purr unfailingly if you tickle their ears and cheeks. They are quite fearless and contented, and at night the sound of crickets has now been entirely replaced by the sound of purring, which strikes the ears as a kind of muffled roar, like hearing the sea from a distance. It is a much more calming noise than that of the crickets, and I for one am quite happy about it. Françoise was at first anxious about getting hay-fever, as she is allergic to cats, but so far, God be praised, she has not been affected, apart from tripping over a cat in the corridor when she went to the bathroom in the dark. Both she and the cat were fortunately unhurt.

These cats are not just here on the estancia, they have apparently invaded the whole district. Within a radius of twenty kilometres everyone is overrun by them, and the dogs, it seems, are too scared to come out. I have seen small black and white ones with happy expressions, ginger ones, white ones with one blue and one green eye, immensely fluffy ones in smoky-blue and short-haired tabbies, but the most remarkable ones are the big black ones. I have become very fond of the one who sits on my blotter and tries to stop me writing.

I have to say that yet more odd things have been happening. The bridge at Chiriguana recently exploded quite spectacularly, killing four soldiers. The dust of the explosion travelled as far as here, so that everything was turned white. The army camped there for a month and then left, and afterwards there was what I can only describe as a plague of laughing. I have not been able to get any sense out of most of the locals for quite some time because they only have to look at you to burst out into guffaws. My washerwoman inadvertently sprayed me with chicha-beer because she was drinking it when I came in to
speak with her on account of her distracting chuckling. Instead of apologising she went off into further howls of hysterical mirth until I too was infected with it and began to laugh. Françoise came in to find out what the joke was, and very soon all three of us were screaming with laughter, our faces dripping with tears, and clutching our stomachs with the pain of the muscular contractions. The only way I could stop was by crawling out of the door and sticking my head into the rain-barrel. My throat hurt terribly afterwards, and so did that of Françoise, but we still cannot help laughing when we remember it.

Everyone here is now paralysed with ferocious hilarity, and all work has completely ceased. I fear very much that soon someone will die as a consequence. Around here no one seems to think such extraordinary events as plagues of cats and plagues of laughter have any significance – I have been told that before I came there were in various places a plague of falling leaves, a plague of sleeplessness, one of invisible hailstones, a plague of amnesia, and another time there was a rainstorm for several years that reduced everything to rust and mould.

I am pleased to say that since I last wrote the People’s Liberation Force has apparently forgotten about me, and I am bringing back the children. Also I have heard that Dona Constanza Evans was recently ransomed by her husband for half a million dollars, and then absconded immediately to Costa Rica. I thought she was a terribly haughty and stiff woman, and so I think her husband is lucky to be shot of her even for so large a sum.

Do you think you could investigate the possibility of sending over a new Land-Rover engine? Mine is now thirty years old and has been restored so many times that there are no more spares of oversized pistons or rings that one can obtain. The exchange rate is so appallingly adverse nowadays that I think it would be cheaper to send one from France, and I will pay you with what is left in my account with the Credit Lyonnaise.

I hope you find this letter more cheering than my last. It is strange how one can be in the depths one minute and on the heights the next (and, of course, vice-versa).

In conclusion, Maman, let me illustrate how much better life is by saying that outside there is a little black and white cat with yellow eyes that has been teaching itself to walk the tightrope on the washing-line – it has fallen off three times – and in the kitchen I hear Françoise and Farides the cook roaring with laughter.

I kiss you many times,

Your loving son,

Antoine.

AFTER A PROTRACTED,
discreet and gentle courtship, including two years of fervent engagement, Profesor Luis, native of Medellin and dedicated educator of peasants, was to be married to Farides, native of Chiriguana, and cook to the French couple recently cured by Pedro and Aurelio. They were to be married in the little adobe church at Chiriguana by the itinerant priest with whom Profesor Luis used to discuss the ideas of Camilo Torres and Oscar Romero.

Josef was overjoyed to see the priest again because he could now, having paid the priest for a proper burial, afford to pay him for three masses to be said for the repose of his soul and its rapid passage through purgatory. Once safely in heaven, Josef believed, he would be able to fornicate an infinite amount of times with inexhaustible pleasure, and this was his secret reason for having spent so much money so conscientiously on his death and resurrection. The priest had already told him that there was no sex in heaven, but Josef replied that this was self-contradictory, and therefore ‘. . . even God himself could not believe such a thing’. The priest sighed and left him to his simple peasant logic.

The cura, Don Ramon, was forty-five years old. He had served the same vast parish ever since he had left the seminary at the age of twenty-three, riding through it in the same
pattern and at the same sober pace on his mule. He sometimes had to go without shelter because down on the savannah there were no tambos as there were in the mountains, and often he fell asleep under the stars wrapped in his gara – his leather saddle blanket – unfed and unwashed. He would arrive in a village, his black garb covered in white dust, and bless unions, perform baptisms, and conduct funerals and masses for those dead since his last visit. He accepted gratefully the hospitality of his parishioners, and was not above sleeping with the animals to save his hosts any trouble. He was small, greying, a little stout, and bore the air of one infinitely oppressed, weary and resigned; when he made the sign of the cross, one felt that he truly understood its significance, for his own life was one of suffering and sacrifice. Now that his eyes were failing him he relied on his own memory for the services, and upon his mule’s memory for travelling his established route.

Don Ramon was a cura of conscience, but many of his fellow priests accepted unscrupulously the offerings that their parishioners left in the church for the consumption of the Virgin and of the dead, and used them for themselves. It was customary for the cura, in return for absolution, to have the pick of the pretty women and father numerous little bastards, known curiously enough as ‘anti-Cristos’, and to do deals with the dying in which he smoothed their way to paradise in return for their patrimony. Many priests became very wealthy landowners. The church hierarchy in the big cities were two-thirds plutocrats and oligarchs who yearned for military government, rich vestments, the extermination of radicals, and who utterly despised and distrusted priests such as Don Ramon, who believed that loving one’s neighbour included looking after their interests. Don Ramon had once been threatened with defrocking for being ‘political’, and since then he had found his vocation a cause of grief.

The little adobe church at Chiriguana had a corrugated-iron roof, bulging and distorted walls, painted pink, and no seats of any description upon its floor of packed earth. The pious amongst the locals had filled it with tinsel, dirty mirrors, and
gaudy home-made statues of the Virgin. Above the painted box that served as the altar there hung a grotesque Corpus Christi, its ghastly countenance contorted in death, its body twisted and lacerated and of a pallid yellow hue, a crown of thorns made of lemon spikes upon its head, and all over it were huge clots of crimson and scarlet blood carefully moulded for realistic effect. Above the door facing it was a similar Christ in Agony, and many times upon visiting the place the priest had been depressed by its tawdriness, and wished that upon the crosses there had hung radiant crowned Christs in eucharistic vestments, the Christus Rex that he adored as his personal image of the Saviour. The cura, however, was accustomed to tolerate and understand the flexible piety of his flock, and even attended without misgivings second baptisms, the Yacucheo, where the brujos exorcised all evil spirits amidst clouds of cigar smoke and pagan chanting. He attended the Lanta Tipina, the rite of the first haircut, but he would not attend La Ispa, because he objected to having to drink baby’s urine.

Farides was dark-eyed, black-haired, and always smiling. She had the appearance of an Haitian, and would have looked perfectly in place in one of Gauguin’s paintings. She would one day be plump, but as yet she was soft and curvaceous, and she had about her an air of archness accentuated by her habit of wearing a white flower above her left ear. For the wedding she had borrowed every bit of the brightest and most colourful clothes that she had been able to find in the whole district, including Felicidad’s scarlet stockings and gold-sequinned skirt. She regretted being so heavily decked out as the sun climbed toward the hour of siesta, when her perspiration beneath her make-up began to make her feel like a stewed chicken.

Profesor Luis was dressed in his only suit, left over from his adolescence in Medellin, when he had still lived with his respectable family. He had grown a few centimetres since then, and the suit was now too tight and too short in the sleeves and legs. To disguise the short sleeves, he made himself a pair of handsome white cuffs out of cardboard, and to disguise the
short legs he wore well-polished black ankle boots with prodigious silver rowels that made him look as macho and as dashing as Pancho Villa himself. About his neck he wore a black western-style tie, and on his head he wore a black guarapon sombrero that he had bought from an Indian once in Cochabamba.

The couple were well loved in the whole district, and their youth, their comeliness, and their tender devotion to each other had touched a sympathetic chord even in the heart of Hectoro, who said only one remark in the whole day. Normally he only said one remark per day because of his hyperbolical pride, but today it was because he was afraid that the sentimental sob lurking in the back of his throat might catch him unawares. He said, ‘The Campas Indians consummate their marriages in the centre of a cheering circle of the tribe. Why don’t we do that?’

The bride and groom set off from the village on two of Don Emmanuel’s finest horses, with flowers and tinsel entwined in the halters and tail-pieces. They rode side by side and were obliged by the party to kiss at every crossroads, amidst cheers of encouragement. Behind the couple rode the rest of the village on horses, donkeys, and mules amidst much mayhem caused by Don Emmanuel’s grey stallion. Misael could scarcely prevent it from trying to mount the female animals and bite the backsides of anyone who insulted it by overtaking. The accompanying cats got between the animals’ feet and others watched from the roadside, twitching their tails and purring.