The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (42 page)

At eleven o’clock the following morning the convoy of trucks stopped outside the gates of the Ex-Officers’ Wing of the Army School of Electricial and Mechanical Engineering. Number Four Platoon poured out of the first vehicle and overpowered the two astonished guards at the sentry box. The gates were opened and the convoy rolled into the courtyard and halted. As the Portachuelo Guards ran into the building the lorries, one by one, did three-point turns, until all of them were facing the gates, ready to go.

As predicted, there was no resistance. The torturers were working in shirt-sleeves when the platoon commanders burst in on them with their men, disarmed them, and made them lie face-down on the floor. Asado, terrified and sweating, was made to hand over all the keys, and made to accompany a sergeant to unlock every door and cupboard in the wing.

The Guards were shocked and nauseated by what they found. The stench of burnt flesh, of faeces, of sweat, urine and fear, made it almost insupportable to be in there at all, and everywhere there were fetid pools of putrefying blood and excrement. Some of the soldiers put their rifle-butts through the bars of the cell windows and smashed the glass to let in some fresh air, and none of them knew what to do with the prisoners who, naked and skeletal, huddled apathetically against the walls and watched them vacantly with the eyes of those already dead. Some of them were indeed already dead; General Fuerte himself was able to identify the bodies of Regina Olsen and the Mad Capitan in a room full of entangled corpses awaiting disposal. ‘We cannot do much for them,’ said the General. ‘Leave them.’

The prisoners were pitifully wounded; most of the men had been crudely castrated, so that their scrota hung in rotting tatters. All of them were covered in a patchwork of bruises, burns, whiplashes. Some of them had broken teeth and missing eyes and ears, and others had missing fingers and toes. The
soldiers found them easy to lead, even though they thought they were being led to more torture. ‘I don’t know anything,’ they said, as the orderlies washed them gently in the baths, ‘I don’t know anything.’

The Corporal from Number Three Platoon found a room with ‘War Chest’ on the door which was filled to the ceiling with clothes, and he and four men brought armfuls of them to the changing rooms of the baths whilst the others of the platoon dressed the passive prisoners in whatever they could find from the heap that roughly fitted.

At the gate the soldiers of Number Four Platoon arrested El Verdugo who was returning from the shops, and the soldiers of Number Two Platoon carried out the non-walking prisoners to the lorries. These prisoners thought they were being carried off for disposal, and those who could still weep or call out, did so.

From the Electrical Wing of the school two instructors watched the scene at a window. ‘I wonder what is going on now,’ said one.

‘Don’t ask,’ replied the other. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

General Fuerte entered the conference room where the torturers were being held. All in all there were fifteen men, and the General recognised Asado, who also recognised him.

‘General!’ exclaimed Asado, and he sprang to his feet and saluted.

‘I remember you,’ said the General. ‘You won the Medal of Honour at the Officer Training College.’

The General turned to a corporal. ‘Take two men and ensure that every telephone is disconnected. After that, delegate six men to carry out all the filing cabinets to the lorries.’ He turned back to Asado. ‘Sit down, man, I do not return salutes to barbarians.’

The General left the Company Comandante in charge and departed in three lorries loaded with the wounded. He drove to the Hospital for Sick Soldiers, having discovered that all the civilian ones were closed, and ordered the medics who were hanging around to get the patients off the trucks. He went to the reception desk and spoke to a young woman of the Army
Medical Regiment. She gave him a pile of forms. He picked one up and found that it was three pages long. ‘You must fill in one for every patient,’ she told him. The General dropped the pile of paper heavily on to her desk. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can fill them in or ignore them as you please. I have too many patients for all that.’

‘I must insist,’ replied the young woman. ‘How many do you have?’

‘About sixty,’ he said, and then added, ‘and you are in no position to insist.’ He tapped the insignia on the shoulder of his combat jacket. ‘Do you know what that means?’

The girl looked at it. ‘It means you are an officer.’

‘It means I am a general!’ he said fiercely. ‘And it means that if you or your hospital do not set yourselves in motion immediately, I will bring in my guardsmen and have you all arrested. Now, move!’

The intimidated girl rang through to the casualty department and soon the hospital was in a flurry of activity. The girl stood beside the General with an appalled and wondering expression on her face as she surveyed the human wreckage that was going by on the stretchers. ‘Who were they?’ she asked, speaking as if they were already dead.

‘Terrorist victims,’ said the General.

‘I am sorry I did not recognise your insignia,’ said the girl. ‘I have never seen a general in combat gear before.’

The General returned to the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, and soon the convoy was heading back to Valledupar, having locked up the gates of the school.

That evening General Ramirez tried to telephone Asado and found the line dead. He sent round a motorcycle courier, who reported that the place was locked up and unguarded. Ramirez sent round a small body of pyragues, who reported that it was as deserted as the
Marie Celeste.
‘Except for some dead bodies.’ Ramirez felt more than ever that his power was slipping away, and he tore the nail off his forefinger and chewed it meditatively whilst the cuticle bled.

Despite the attentions of the medical orderlies, three of the
walking wounded died on the bumpy and prolonged journey, from the effects of internal bleeding. The rest of them Fuerte left at the Valledupar Military Hospital with strict instructions that their admission was to be kept confidential ‘on the Highest Authority’. He devoted a week to interviewing the torturers and going through the information in the filing cabinets. The girls in the office were delighted to see him, until they realised how much work they now had to do. They were ordered to photostat twice every paper in the cabinets, and address one copy to the address of each ‘next of kin’ as entered on the forms. They were to bundle the second copies in alphabetical order and address each parcel to the
New York Herald.
The originals General Fuerte put into a bank vault in Asuncion.

He flew to Merida and posted his bundles and his copies for relatives, and then flew back to Valledupar to organise the secret but legal court-martial of all the torturers, with himself and the Brigadier presiding. To save time and energy he decided to try them all at once, as the evidence was the same for all of them, the witnesses were the same, the excuses were the same, and the sentence was to be the same.

Fuerte and the Brigadier brought in one witness after another from those who were in the Valledupar Military Hospital. The General quoted long passages he had copied from the files.

He had to remind the Comandante frequently of his obligation to defend the prisoners to the best of his ability, but the latter found the task repulsive, and repeated what the prisoners had already repeated many times. ‘They were acting under orders.’ The General found out very quickly what he already knew, that the orders came from General Ramirez. Asado said, ‘But it can never be proved. The service was unofficial.’

The General tapped his pen on the table. ‘It is very easily proved,’ he said. ‘You did not destroy all his orders as instructed. I have them handwritten by him, as left by you in your filing cabinets.’

‘Then you know, Sir, that it was not our fault. We did our duty according to our orders.’

After several days of the hearing, the General and the Brigadier decided to call an end to what had become a tedious charade. They called in the fifteen torturers for sentence. It was the Brigadier who spoke.

‘During the Nuremberg Trials it became established as a principle of International Law that “acting under orders” is not an excuse for the kinds of atrocities you have daily committed under your own admission and according to the sworn testimony of witnesses. This court finds you guilty on all charges: of murder, false imprisonment, illegal abduction, assault, malicious wounding, theft, burglary, breaking and entering, rape, false arrest, obeying illegal orders and so on and so on. General Fuerte will now pass sentence.’

General Fuerte put down his pen and looked at the torturers solemnly. ‘The standard sentence for crimes of this kind is, according to the Military Penal Code, that you should be put to death by firing squad.’

The torturers found their knees beginning to shake, and their lips to quiver. Asado felt panic arise in his bowels, and he could scarcely restrain himself from defecating.

‘However,’ continued the General, ‘I am going to use against you methods similar to those that you have used against others.’

The General paused again, and then continued. ‘Your methods remind me of medieval times, and therefore I will pass a medieval sentence to fit your crimes. No doubt you have heard of trial by ordeal; people used to be forced to plunge their hands into boiling water, or to walk across burning coals. I sentence you to trial by ordeal.’

When the men were led out, the Brigadier turned to the General. ‘What do we do about Ramirez?’

‘Nothing yet,’ said the General. ‘I have released all the papers to the foreign press. No doubt he will resign and then be arrested and tried legally. If that does not happen we will have to arrest him ourselves and try him by court-martial.’

‘An internal coup?’

‘Exactly.’

The General returned to his quarters and fed his cat, which in an astonishingly small amount of time had grown to the size of a puma. He went to the stable and fed Maria with cane leaves, and then he took the cat for a walk with Papagato and the other animals.

That evening the torturers were flown several hundred kilometres over the jungle and thrown out of the aeroplane. They floated down on their parachutes, to become entangled in the trees of the territory of the Chuncho tribe, a neolithic people who still practised six-month trial-marriages, and cannibalism.

DAWN FOUND THE
wanderers shivering with cold and with fevers. They huddled despondently around their little fires, chewing guava jelly and blocks of panel a to get themselves going, and complaining of headaches. The air was so cold and so pure that it hurt to draw breath, but most of the plainsfolk had never before seen the vapour of their breath condense, so they took deep breaths and puffed their cheeks to watch themselves create fog, exclaiming ‘Whooba!’ and laughing at the other people enveloped in their own mist. The cattle too had never seen it before, and jumped nervously at every exhalation, while the cats tried to play with it, sitting back on their haunches and flailing with their paws. There was also a low mist on the ground up to the height of their knees, so that everybody seemed to be walking on a cloud, like the dark shadows of angels, or lost spirits waiting at the gates of life. When the sun rose rapidly below them at the eastern end of the valley people gaped, for never before had they been so high above the sun; the mist about their feet began to rise up to their thighs and then to their waists, so that the children could not see and the adults were cut in half. When the mist reached their heads everyone who was standing sat down to be able to see anything at all and it was as if they had descended into a twilight, for the sky had disappeared and it had grown half dark.

Suddenly the mist vanished and the day lightened. As the
sun began to thaw their bones the people shivered again, as they had on waking, and had to goad themselves into activity. They brewed coffee, wrapped their possessions into their packs, filled their canteens and their gourds at the stream, and began to tie the animals back into their train. The horses and mules seemed to be perfectly fit, but the great ceibu cattle were obviously suffering from their night in the unaccustomed cold; their eyes were rheumy, their chests rattled, and their nostrils were dripping. Don Emmanuel inspected them with concern, as most of them were his, and he was sentimental about them. He resolved that somehow he would have to protect them at night against the frost, or many of them would die, especially as the trek would take away their fat.

Don Emmanuel had been very surprised when he had heard that Dona Constanza was with the guerrillas, and he was even more surprised upon conversing with her to find that she had discarded her oligarchic manners, had become the lover of a campesino, and now found his ribaldry amusing and a pretext for badinage. The first thing she had said upon seeing him was, ‘Hola cabron! And how are your dingleberries? Do they still adorn your nether parts?’

‘Indeed they do,’ he replied, ‘I am seeking volunteers to pluck them off.’

‘Then,’ said Constanza, ‘you will find here many of your old friends from the whorehouses to oblige you.’

‘I see,’ said Don Emmanuel, ‘that you have found a fine young man to remove yours.’

‘Your eyes do not deceive you, Don Emmanuel, though unlike your fine self I wash often enough to prevent them from accumulating.’

In the whole gathering there were only two people who felt at sea with strangers, Antoine and Françoise Le Moing, who only really knew Farides, who had been their cook. In the changed circumstances of the exodus it somehow did not seem appropriate to have servants, and so they stuck with Profesor Luis and Farides, doing their half of the work in order to avoid isolation. Profesor Luis found the French couple well educated
and interesting, so he and Farides devoted much conversational time to improving the others’ Spanish and knowledge of local history.

They had ascended through two quebradas when Pedro spotted a cave up on the right, to the north, and he and Aurelio went up to see it, because Aurelio said he had a notion of what it was. When they entered it was almost immediately dark, and so Pedro left to fetch his lamp.