The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (13 page)

One morning after fervent prayer Garcia decided to save the bishop’s soul by destroying his own innocence and committing the very crime for which he had been condemned. In the brothel the girl crossed herself before she made love to him, and Garcia gave her absolution afterwards. It would not be far from the truth to say that Garcia acquired a taste for fornication thereafter; he quite possibly believed that by committing the sin as often as possible he made doubly sure of saving the bishop’s soul.

Garcia continued his ministry on his own and unsanctioned by the church, by becoming mendicant. He wandered from pueblo to pueblo, comforting the sick and the dying, begging alms, preaching the Gospel and blessing the unions that substituted for marriage. Daily he grew more angry,
bewildered and depressed by the poverty, ignorance and suffering of the campesinos, and when he was finally abducted by the guerrillas on suspicion of being a spy he found himself at last amongst his true brothers.

They had taken him when one of their number had observed him entering and leaving three brothels in a row. Reasoning that he could not possibly be a priest, must therefore be in disguise, and must therefore be a spy, Franco had marched him off at the business end of his Kalashnikov.

The camp at that time was run by the second leader; the first leader had organised an extortion campaign throughout the countryside in order to raise funds for the revolution. When a very large sum had been amassed, he had absconded with it to Spain. The second leader was to do exactly the same thing a year later, but at the time of which we speak he was unpleasantly present, and knocked Father Garcia about with his boots and his rifle butt until the priest was spitting blood and almost unable to cross himself. He was tied to a tree and left for the night, but in the morning he proved he was a priest by reciting the service for the burial of the dead all the way through, after which he absolved the second leader of any blame for the previous night’s violence. This left the guerrillas with a dilemma; most of them did not want to kill a priest, however lecherous, and on the other hand it seemed unwise to let him go, because he might inform. The second leader wanted to cut his tongue out so that he could not talk, cut his hands off so that he could not write, pull his eyes out so that he would not recognise them again, and then let him go. ‘These are small things to lose for your country,’ he told Father Garcia solemnly.

‘There is no need,’ replied Garcia. ‘With your permission, I will stay and fight alongside you.’

‘We would shoot you at the first sign of betrayal,’ said the second leader, considerably taken aback.

‘At the first sign of betrayal I will shoot myself,’ replied Garcia.

‘Tiene cojones!’ exclaimed the guerrillas, chuckling.

Garcia was a small, lithe man, with quick movements and the
lugubrious face of a hare. Very soon he was bearded and burned brown like all the others, and had the same crows’ feet about the eyes from squinting into the distance against the sun. However, he never discarded his ragged ecclesiastical dress even though it somewhat hampered his movements and made him very hot indeed. In time his gentleness, his heroic deeds, his wise counsel and his active concern for his comrades endeared him to the whole band, and even the genuinely atheist Marxists amongst them grew to respect him, especially as he could quote pieces of the Gospel which sounded just like Engels.

It was Garcia who took the fledgeling Federico under his wing and taught him how to use a gun, how to trap animals, which berries were poisonous, which plants were medicinal, always fought beside him in skirmishes, and always tended the cuts that Federico liked to think of as ‘wounds’. He it was also who heard Federico’s confessions and absolved him of the death of the tall campesino whose goat he had tried to shoot.

He was with Federico when the latter spotted General Carlo Maria Fuerte from the top of the crag.

‘Let us take his gun,’ whispered Federico. Garcia considered for a moment, tugging the end of his beard.

‘I think,’ said Garcia, ‘that if he has a revolver rather than a rifle, he must be something a bit different. No one sane uses a revolver for hunting. I think we had better take him and his gun and show them both to Remedios. I also think that it is suspicious that he has binoculars – peons do not habitually carry them, in my experience.’

Federico restrained himself from showing that he was impressed by Garcia’s reasoning; replying with the air of an equal he nodded and said, ‘In addition, Garcia, his burro is too healthy to be campesino. That too is suspicious.’

Garcia smiled to himself and indicated to Federico with a stabbing motion of his finger that he was to go down first. Adeptly and silently they slithered and skipped down the mountainside and stationed themselves in the scrub at either side of the steep path, just on the blind side of a bend.

General Carlo Maria Fuerte came round the corner whistling a sentimental tune from Juarez to find himself face to face with two heavily armed men, one of them obviously little more than a boy. He was so surprised that all he could do was say, ‘Bandidos?’ in a strangled tone of voice.

The boy levelled a rather long and old-looking weapon and said proudly, ‘No Senor; guerrilleros.’

‘Ah,’ said the General, even more taken aback.

‘May I enquire who you are?’ said Garcia, ‘and what you are doing here?’ Garcia prodded the binoculars and the camera with the end of his sub-machine-gun, clicked his gun and added, ‘May I also ask the function of this apparatus?’

The General decided to tell part of the truth, as his instincts told him that he might pay a heavy price for lies. ‘I am a researcher into butterflies and humming-birds. At present I am researching humming-birds, and my name is Fuerte.’

‘Ah, humming-birds,’ said Garcia. ‘Are you familiar with a wonderful piece by Sagreras called “Imitacion al Vuelo del Picaflor”?’

‘Indeed,’ said Fuerte, ‘I heard it in Buenos Aires once. I know it by the shorter title of “El Colibri”.’

‘It is a pleasure to meet a cultivated man,’ exclaimed Garcia. ‘We shall continue our discussion whilst you come to meet our leader. Please do not oblige me to use force.’

Federico jabbed his Lee Enfield into the small of the General’s back and they set off up the path with no events other than the frequent refusals and whimsical obstinacies of the General’s burro, which Federico was leading by its halter.

By the time they reached the deserted Indian village which served as their camp, Garcia and the General had discussed the Venezuelan waltzes of Antonio Lauro, agreed that the Paraguayan guitarist Agustin Barrios must have been very eccentric and blessed with huge hands, had deplored the music of the Argentine, Ginastera, praised that of the Mexican, Chavez, and also that of the Brazilian, Villa-Lobos. When they arrived, Garcia was singing ‘Mis Dolencias’ to the General to demonstrate a real case of ‘saudade’, and the General was
listening to him with surprise, having only just noticed that his frayed and filthy garments were those of a priest.

As they entered the camp a crowd of guerrillas appeared as if from nowhere to witness the event, some of them not breaking off their conversations; the General heard them as through a thick plate of glass, wondering if this was all really happening to him.

In a moment he was standing before Remedios, who listened attentively to Garcia’s story. ‘Search him,’ she ordered. Garcia turned to the General, ‘With your permission?’ and the General nodded assent.

Unfortunately for him, the General had not had the presence of mind to attempt to dispose of his cedula and his military identification card, and Garcia very quickly found them in the General’s shirt pocket.

‘Madre de Dios!’ exclaimed Remedios. ‘We have here not only a General, but the military governor of Cesar! I don’t believe this! We must instantly hold a council. Federico!’

Federico ran out into the sunlight, straight into the pack of people who had been attempting to listen. ‘Council! Council!’ he shouted, waving his arms, and more ragged warriors emerged from the huts and hurried to sit down in a ring in front of Remedios’ hut, eagerly asking each other what was going on.

Inside the hut, Garcia reproached the General. ‘You lied. You said you were a lepidopterist and a humming-bird expert. To lie is a sin before God, and very stupid before men with guns.’

The General looked at him with amusement. ‘I told no lies. My book on the nation’s butterflies is in my baggage if you care to look. You may read it if it pleases you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Garcia, ‘and may I also read
Idle Days in Patagonia?’

‘Of course,’ replied the General, ‘but try not to crack the spine.’

‘This climate and the insects will destroy your books before I do,’ responded Garcia.

‘That’s very true,’ said the General. ‘I have had holes drilled straight through my books by termites, and in the rainy season I dare not open them since the humidity unglues them entirely.’

Garcia laughed. ‘In more peaceful times, General, we should invent books indestructible in the tropics.’

‘In more peaceful times we should also teach the people to read them, but I fear that too much money is spent feeding the army that defends us from you.’

‘I do not feel,’ said Garcia, ‘that when released from active service your soldiers would necessarily become teachers. When they come across teachers in the pueblos they customarily kill them, unless they are women, in which case they rape them first.’

Garcia and the General looked at each other in silence for several seconds, until the General said, ‘If that was true my friend, I would have them court-martialled. However, I do not believe it.’

Garcia laughed ironically, and slapped a mosquito off his arm. ‘General, I think you will stay with us for a little while – that is, if we don’t shoot you – and you will soon find out for yourself what the Army does. Since you are in charge of it in Cesar, I am very surprised that you do not know already, especially as it is you that orders it to do what it does.’

‘Padre,’ said Fuerte, very seriously, ‘I have never ordered indiscriminate crime. You insult me to suggest otherwise.’

‘Then the left hand knoweth not what the right hand is doing,’ said Garcia.

‘I think the left wing knoweth not what it is doing either,’ replied Fuerte. ‘But in any case, Padre, may I ask you one thing?’

Garcia nodded.

‘I would ask of you that if I am to die you would first take my confession, and afterwards bury me decently.’

‘I doubt it will come to that,’ said Garcia, ‘but naturally I would do as you wish in the event.’

‘Thank you, Padre. Now may I ask what you are doing fighting? You, a man of God?’

‘I want to do some good in the world. And why on earth are you in the army, a cultivated man who likes butterflies and the music of Chavez?’

At that moment Federico walked in agitatedly. ‘Bring him out Garcia. He is to be tried by the council as an enemy of the people and of civilisation.’

The General smiled wryly. ‘Let’s go then, Padre. And the answer to your question is the same as your answer to mine.’

The ornithological General stepped out of the cool darkness of the old grass hut into sunshine that burst on him like a starshell.

He shielded his eyes against the heat and found himself standing in a seated semicircle of about thirty ruffianly warriors, some of whom examined him with idle interest, and others of whom stared at him with a hatred and malice that seemed to crash into him with an intensity even more stunning and surprising than the tropical sun of the mountains. He turned and caught Garcia’s eye; ‘Also be good to my burra. Her name is Maria.’

CAMPESINOS DO NOT
become guerrillas for the same reasons as middle-class intellectuals from towns. In the case of the latter, the theoretical conviction comes first, and is nourished by the long hours of involved conversation in cafés and student union refectories. Then some of the intellectuals disappear into the countryside, as Hugo Blanco did in Peru, and attempt to organise and politicise the peasantry and the miners in the mountains. Or else, like the poet Javier Heraud or Che Guevara, they throw their lives away in the jungle or the mountains by staging heroic ‘focos’ which never win any territory permanently and which are always crushed because the peasants and defectors give away their positions to the Army.

Campesinos often speak no Spanish, have no education at all, and live in places where they have been cut off from the rest of the world all their lives. They have no interest in ideas signified by long words, and rarely become guerrillas, because they accept things being the way they are and cannot leave their minifundios for fear of losing a crop or their steers.

A sizeable proportion of them however work in feudal conditions on giant encomiendas that can take a week or more to cross on horseback. In Bolivia and Peru there have been land reforms, but these have seldom been implemented by local
authorities far out in the interior, and they have always been bogged down in a morass of bureaucracy and sharp dealing.

Some of the encomiendas are run by enlightened and benign patrones who build houses, open schools and clinics, and pay for local policemen; such a one was Don Emmanuel.

The Carillo brothers were of the other species, however. The Carillos paid their thousands of workers nothing at all, but obliged them to work six days a week in return for allowing a minifundio to each family, of which three-fifths of the produce had to go to the Carillos.

As if these by no means uncommon conditions of slavery were not enough, the Carillos had a permanent gang of thugs hired to keep the peons in line, and did not readily permit local authorities access to their land. The Carillos freely exercised the
jus primae noctis
, and raped and brutalised when and where the whim came upon them.

One day the two brothers raped a young woman, wife of Pedro Arevalo, and then murdered her and left her body in the coca plantation. To forestall Arevalo’s complaints they denounced him to the police for theft, and then returned with the police to arrest him. On the way they stopped for a few drinks, and became so incapacitated that they sent a young boy called Paulo to fetch him. He arrived on his burro, and there ensued a violent altercation in which Pedro Arevalo denounced the Carillo brothers for the rape and murder of his wife, and the Carillo brothers accused him of larceny, and of bearing false witness.