The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts

IN CREATING AN
imaginary Latin American country, I have jumbled up and adapted incidents from many different countries at different times in their history. I have borrowed words and phrases from Brazilian Portuguese and its regional variants, Latin-American Spanish and its regional variants, and from many Indian languages and their dialects. In some of these latter there is, as far as I know, no standardised spelling. Since there is general anarchy in the use of accents, I have decided to dispense with them altogether.

I am indebted to many sources for my research, but I wish to acknowledge in particular my debt to Richard Gott’s
Rural Guerrillas in Latin America
(Pelican, 1973), and John Simpson and Jana Bennett’s
The Disappeared
(Robson Books, 1985). The political information in these books was invaluable.

I owe special thanks to Helen Wright, whose conscientious checking of the manuscript enabled me to eliminate a great many errors.

1
CAPITAN RODRIGO FIGUERAS’ FINEST HOUR

IT HAD BEEN
an auspicious week for Capitan Rodrigo Jose Figueras. On Monday he had with his platoon stopped a truck loaded with marijuana on the road from Chiriguana to Valledupar and made the peasant park it near a bridge. According to the usual procedure he had confiscated the truck and its contents from the driver, whereupon the driver, as was usual, offered to ‘pay the fine’ instead, which meant buying the consignment back. He handed over to the Capitan one of several bundles which he carried for this purpose, one for each roadblock. The Capitan then shot the driver through the head and liberated entirely the truck, its contents, and many thousands of pesos. The Lieutenant began to write a brief report on the driver – ‘shot whilst resisting arrest’ – and sealed it in an envelope with the man’s identity card; meanwhile the Capitan took the truck and the jeep to the farm with the airstrip and sold the marijuana to the gringo with the aeroplane for many more thousands, then he sold the truck for next to nothing to a white farmer who could arrange the documents, and then he drove in the jeep back to his platoon’s encampment by the river. Liberally, he handed out a few thousand pesos each to the men, and at his own expense sent the Corporal to the village to buy a case of aguardiente and ron cana with orders to return also with a selection of whores from twelve to
forty in several shapes and sizes so that all tastes could be catered for; consequently the village men had to go without for a week. The Capitan was thirty-five, with a wife and five children who lived in some style in Santa Marta in his absence. His hairy belly spread his shirt apart at the buttons, he was thick-lipped and leering-eyed, and his hair lay flat across his head by the weight of its own grease. He had been trained in Panama by the United States Army, at their own expense, and he painted a little white mark on the door of his jeep for every whore there had been.

Misael woke with the dawn as he always did, and threw dried maize stems on the embers to get them going again so that he could have strong coffee with his bocadillos for breakfast before he left with his machete for the day’s work. He was tall and grizzled, dark-eyed and cheerful, his body sculpted by the muscle of a life’s labour into a Greek ideal. It was the same with all the mestizo and mulatto peasants, for their bodies were all perfect in shape, strength and endurance; but their old age was not protracted, and hardship was a high price for beauty.

He checked his little boy, who had been terribly disfigured when he had sat in the fire as an infant, and decided not to wake him or his wife. Chinks of light began to filter through his brush house, and he took a friendly kick at the chicken who stalked ridiculously through the doorless door. It clucked indignantly and then ignored him, pecking furiously and futilely at a cockroach, while Misael checked his shoes for scorpions and spiders, and ensured that no coral snake was in the brush roof. Satisfied that all was in order, he took his machete and went down to the river to whet it on one of the stones before he slashed down the bananas, cleared the maize field, and gelded the mule. All this he had to accomplish before it got too hot to work.

He spat on the ground and cursed at the vultures lining the trees as he walked to the hacienda. Then he crossed himself, and for good measure muttered a secreto against evil that his mother had taught him in a language that he did not know.

Profesor Luis looked at the children on the floor in front of him. The oldest was fourteen and the youngest was four, and he taught all of them everything he knew, and a lot of things he had not even realised that he knew until he taught them. He came from a good family in Medellin that he truly hated, and from whom he had run away when he was seventeen. Now he was engaged to Farides, who cooked for the French couple, Françoise and Antoine Le Moing, at their estancia, and what he was not paid in pesos he was paid in gratitude and affection by the children and their families who knew that education was the only way up. Every girl in the surrounding countryside wanted to marry him and have clever children. Whenever the weary priest came, every two years or so, to marry those who had already cohabited for years, and to conduct funerals for those long-rotted since his last visit, he would visit Profesor Luis also, and they would talk about Camilo Torres, Oscar Romero, Jose Marti, and the oligarchy, and then the priest would go on his mule to the next stop in his vast parish, ignoring the contraceptives sold at the liquor and machete store, and remaining polite to the brujos, the magicians who could cure cattle and raise spirits.

Profesor Luis observed the vultures in the trees and instructed the oldest boy to shoot one, and also an iguana, because today it was biology. There was a sharp report and a hideous cacophony, and the boy returned, barely able to carry the repellent creature; then he went to find an iguana. The Profesor pointed out the parasites in the bird’s feathers, and they talked about parasites in general. He disembowelled the bird and carefully explained that this was the liver, you must not drink too much or yours will swell and you will die. These are the kidneys, drink clean water. These are the lungs, do not smoke. He showed them how if you press up on the talons, they close automatically. He took two sticks, cut off the wings, plucked the tail feathers, and they made a glider so he could explain the principles of flight.

Then the boy returned with a large green lizard, and with the
aid of an old car battery and two copper wires they traced in the animal’s twitches the pathways of nerves, and drew the pathways in a big diagram in the dust outside.

At the end of the day Profesor Luis threw the remains of the vulture to the vultures and roasted the iguana on a spit over the embers. It was cheap and better than chicken. Farides came to the door of his hut and said, ‘Querido, you must know that it is very bad luck to kill a vulture.’

Consuelo the whore was not looking forward to Friday night. She was a little nauseous from the alcohol, and her insides felt like ground glass, because she had had to satisfy all the men who normally went to the other whores who had gone in the jeep. She thought of Friday night and said, ‘Mierda.’ She could not take Friday night off because she was a good whore, conscious of public service, and besides, it was the night when you earned the most, except for public holidays. She thought of how all the campesinos would be paid by the gringo farmers and come in on their mules. How they would become drunk and there would be the usual fights with machetes and someone would lose an arm. How the two rows of puterias up both sides of one street would be filled with queues of men getting drunker as they waited, and she would have to get drunk too so that she did not mind getting very sore indeed. What the hell; she was the only person in the whole village, apart from the other whores and Don Emmanuel’s employees, who had been able to afford a concrete floor. A whore at twelve, plenty of children, a concrete floor at twenty. It’s a good life, and no man tells you what to do unless it’s fair exchange.

The little three-year-old who belonged to Dolores the whore needed milk. She breast-fed him, because there was no food at the moment, and the nino liked it, and anyway, all the whores breast-fed each other’s children. It was a huge contented family with a thousand generous fathers, and every Thursday Don Emmanuel took you in a Land-Rover to the clinic in Chiriguana to check your blood so that you never made anyone ill.

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