The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (22 page)

‘How do you know we are here?’ asked Federico, who had always believed that the encampment was a secret to all the world.

‘I live in the jungle below,’ said Aurelio. ‘I have always known. I have something important to tell the woman. I have something that all of you should know, if you would live.’

Federico ran off to fetch Remedios, who came more out of curiosity than a sense of urgency. ‘Here is the woman,’ said Aurelio, and gravely he stood up and faced her. ‘I have news, if you would save your life.’

Remedios sensed that it behoved her to listen with respect to this old man with the wispy beard and the outlandish costume of a foreign Indian. ‘Speak,’ she said, and put her hands on her hips as she listened.

‘The soldiers have hidden sudden-death-by-thunder on the path you take through the jungle when you go to the savannah. You must make another path.’

‘Sudden-death-by-thunder?’ asked Remedios. ‘What is that?’

‘They are dishes,’ said Aurelio, ‘that are hidden in the ground. When the feet press upon them the legs and the body are flayed and broken. You must make another path.’

‘He means mines,’ said Garcia, shocked. ‘They have planted mines!’

‘Mines,’ repeated Aurelio slowly. ‘Is that another name?’

Remedios nodded. ‘Sudden-death-by-thunder is a better name. We thank you for telling us. Why did you tell us?’

‘My daughter liked you,’ said Aurelio. ‘She used to watch you. She was killed by the sudden-death-by-thunder. I did not wish the same for you: also . . .’ added Aurelio, ‘I have planned death for the soldiers on that path and you should walk another way.’

‘You have planned death?’ asked Remedios.

‘Yes,’ said Aurelio, ‘I have planned death.’

‘I see,’ Remedios said. ‘But if they come back they will step on their own mines. They will not come back.’

‘They come back,’ said Aurelio, ‘to see who they have killed. They mark by each dish with a secret mark, and they do not step on them. The animals do not die because my daughter watches over them, but you will die if you cannot see her.’

‘Your daughter?’ said Garcia. ‘I thought you said she was killed?’

‘She was killed,’ said Aurelio patiently. ‘Why do I have to say everything twice? Her spirit watches.’

Gonzago and Tomaso crossed themselves fervently.

‘Old man,’ said Remedios, ‘will you be with us, if you hate the soldiers?’

‘I have a life to live,’ said Aurelio, shaking his head, ‘but I will watch for you, and I will watch over you. My daughter and I wili watch over you.’

‘Thank you, old man,’ said Remedios.

‘My name is Aurelio,’ he said as he walked away, his dignity as solid and impressive as it had been when he had arrived.

‘This means,’ said Remedios, ‘that the army have an idea where we are.’

‘I do not think so,’ said Gloria de Escobal. ‘It would be just like them to put mines in any old place and just hope they get someone.’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Remedios, ‘we will think of moving camp. I think there is a risk.’

‘A pity,’ said Garcia, ‘I like it here.’

‘You would not like it when the helicopters come in and carpet us with napalm,’ said Remedios. ‘I remember how my companeros died in my former group.’ She shuddered. ‘Their screams as they ran burning I shall remember all my life. It sticks and it cannot be shaken off. If you beat it with your hands, your hands burn also. It is the worst form of death. God help me, when I die, may I do so cleanly, by blood and not by fire.’

‘By God’s grace,’ said Gloria, ‘you shall die in your bed, beloved of the nation, long after the victory.’

Remedios smiled sadly. ‘It hurts to think what one has thrown away.’ She walked off slowly to her hut, and Garcia watched her go: ‘Blessings on you, Remedios,’ he said.

Aurelio arrived home just before sunset, as he had planned. He first went to the compound and opened the gate wide. The dogs gathered around, whining and barking in expectation of food. ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘I give you freedom to roam and live in peace, nobly. If you are hungry or sick or when it is time to die, I shall welcome you and I shall care for you. I shall listen for you in the forest. Beware of the path and heed Parlanchina when she warns you away.’

He turned and walked to the door of the hut, leaving open the gate. The dogs milled around, confused by the want of food, the open gate, and the change of routine. Then one of them, who was to be their first leader, picked up a scent in the air and was off across the clearing, nose to the ground. One by one the others followed, except for an old weary bitch who plodded over
to her master and placed her wet muzzle in his hand. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘old friend, you may stay.’ She settled on the ground at his feet and fell asleep. From that time on the dogs came and went as they pleased, and Aurelio became their uncle rather than their father and mother.

When the dogs had gone Aurelio fetched his machete and went out to cut several straight stakes. These he divided into three piles. Of one of the piles he made two frameworks. On the pile of shorter stakes he fashioned sharp spikes which he hardened in the fire. Then he did the same with the larger stakes. The smaller stakes he lashed to the two frameworks. He fashioned the springs from twisted hide and flexible wood, and then he set the release catch. He prodded it with a piece of wood and the contraption sprang up as he had intended. Then he made another one. He took a spade and a machete and the pile of long stakes tied in a bundle on his back, and on the path he dug two deep pits. The stakes he set in the ground at the bottom, and then he cut twigs with the machete and laid them across the top of the pits. On top of these he scattered leaves from the forest floor. Beside each pit he left a secret mark, as the soldiers had done with the mines. Then he returned home and fetched the two contraptions. For these he scooped shallow pits, and again covered them with leaves. When he had finished he sat down to rest, and to suck coca from his pestle. Then, at the beginning of the series of traps, mines and pits, and also at the end, he urinated across the path. Every day he returned with a gourd of his urine collected in the previous twenty-four hours and sprinkled it in the same places. In this way he ensured that all animals, scenting humans, would avoid the dangers of that section of the path.

Remedios and her group moved out of the huts and went two valleys away to a place more inaccessible but nearer to Chiriguana. There they built their own brush huts in the trees. They were careful to make no tell-tale clearings that could be seen from the air, and they became more professional about stealth and concealment. Only Aurelio, and perhaps Parlanchina, knew where they had gone.

After their hurried departure the Indians, who had never really deserted their village, moved straight back in to resume their ancient, unhurried, and peaceful life, remote from the people and the civilisation they feared and despised. Once more little naked children ran in the clearing and women suckled babies at their breasts leaning against doorways. Once more old men chewed coca in the shade, and young ones cultivated bananas and cassava on the terraces.

And then, as it had to, the day prophesied by Remedios arrived. The aerial photographs taken by a foreign spy-plane in the upper atmosphere had clearly revealed activity, and the mountain rangers had observed the People’s Vanguard through powerful binoculars from a neighbouring peak.

Two weeks after the People’s Vanguard had moved out and the Indians had moved back in, the Indians heard a rumbling and a rhythmic whirring in the distance. They had seen helicopters before – did not the Army often crash them in the mountains? Were not those pilots human sacrifices that the white men made to their gods? The Indians came out of their huts and stood in the clearing to watch the helicopters pass.

The first gunship to appear over the roof of the trees was flying so low that they thought it was going to crash, and they started to run. Two rockets streaked from the tubes beside the fuselage, and simultaneously machine-gunners opened up from either side through the open doors. The rockets exploded in a cataclysm of molten shards of metal, the machine-guns yammered and rattled, and the terrified and mutilated people on the ground either lay twisted in their death-throes, or crawled desperately, dragging their broken and bleeding limbs. No one made it to safety. The women and children keened and screamed in their fearful agonies, and the men, conscious even in the presence of an apocalypse of their proud stoic tradition, bit back their anguish and moaned softly. One of their number raised his bow to fire back in defiance, but he was enveloped in flame, as were they all, as the napalm cluster from the second gunship fell hungrily among them. They rose and fell and thrashed, these burning people, their eyes melting in their
sockets, their bones calcining as their blood boiled amongst the obscenely ballooning blisters. Some of them fought to wipe away the adhesive chemical of hell, and flailed and writhed, or staggered drunkenly, convulsed with the delirium of their incandescent excruciation.

This scene from the vilest imaginings of Satan was almost anticlimaxed by the flechettes of the third gunship. The steel darts whined and whirred among the smouldering bodies and the few corpses that still stirred. They were superfluous as they transfixed and tore apart the blackened remains of the Indians.

The helicopters passed over once more, and then passed back to land further up the valley. The soldiers pouring out of them fanned out and advanced in V-formation to the commands blown on the captain’s whistle. No one fired on them from the rocks and the trees, and the airborne troops began to relax.

When they charged upon the village over the last hundred metres they were screaming and firing. But something made them falter in the last steps of their headlong rush. Gingerly they stepped amongst the charred and tortured remains. The loathsome stench of burning flesh mingled with the delicate scent of napalm. In the trees the parrots began to screech against the silence. The men looked at the corpses and saw and smelt a vision of the inferno of hell. One by one they staggered away to double over, to vomit, and when there was no more vomit or saliva, to retch.

The Capitan saw the bodies of little children, and even recognised the outline in charcoal of one or two women. He went and looked into the huts and found the meagre possessions of Indians, but not the arms of terrorists. Outside he walked numbly among the bodies, his handkerchief over his nose and mouth in a vain attempt to exclude the noisome fumes. He went and sat away from the village, on a rock, and his men wandered like zombies, demented with horror.

The Lieutenant came and sat next to the Capitan, and, his face contorted and pale, blurted out, ‘Mierda, Capitan, they were cholos. There were children, and women. Even dogs.’

The Capitan did not reply. He bent forward and was sick
between his feet. He buried his face in his hands and began to shake violently, uncontrollably.

‘Mierda,’ said the Lieutenant.

The Capitan began to weep, and the tears flowed out between his fingers.

GENERAL FUERTE FELL
into a profound melancholy during his captivity, but it was not the loss of his freedom that tormented him. As a military man he had never really known freedom anyway, bound up as he was with regulations and duties. To some extent he was oppressed by boredom, and the time hung heavily with him. He was cloistered in the same hut as Dona Constanza, but even though they had known each other before the events here related, they found that they had little in common, and were not affected by incarceration in the same way.

What tortured General Fuerte was that he no longer knew what to think. The guerrilleros generally seemed to like him, and they brought him fruit or nuts to eat, and would slap him on the back and say, ‘Don’t worry, Cabron!’ Fuerte also grew to like them, against his will. Father Garcia, particularly, became close to him, and they would pass long hours in earnest conversation, sometimes becoming heated and vehement. Fuerte became infected by Garcia’s glorious vision of the world-to-be. He listened to Garcia lyrically describing his prognostications of an Arcadia where there were no more countries and therefore no possibility of war. Where there was a universal brotherhood of man sharing all things equally and where the means of production was owned by the people and
produced what was needed by the many rather than what was wanted for the frivolities of the few. Garcia talked of the theology of liberation, where it was a part of loving one’s neighbour to fight for their freedom.

Garcia talked also of the injustices suffered by the people, and told the General long horrific stories about cases he knew of brutality, greed and oppression.

The General flinched inwardly when he heard all these things. He argued strongly with Garcia that all utopias breed misery, that the people who win revolutions are the worst possible people for running countries afterwards, that only a free market is flexible enough to supply the people’s changing needs, that it was a blasphemy and an obscenity to kill in the name of God (‘Your side does,’ replied Garcia), and that there would be no need for repression by the state if it were not for left-wing subversion and terrorism. ‘There would be no need for it,’ replied Garcia, ‘but it would still happen. It always has.’

Both men appealed to experience, to the lessons of history, to the will of God, to reason, and neither man would give ground. But Fuerte was infected by Garcia’s visions of Eden, and like all infections it prickled and irritated and itched, and the more he scratched it the less it went away. Fuerte was a man philosophically at war with himself, and he became enmeshed and entangled in ifs and buts, in qualifications and exceptions, corollaries, definitions, oughts and shoulds and possibilities and rights and injustices. The two ideologies fought full-scale set-piece battles in his mind, and he drew further and further away from that clarity of vision which he had carried with him all his life. He looked back at that vision with regret and nostalgia, but also thought of it as a time of immaturity. Like all intelligent men who no longer know what to think, he sank into a depression so paralysing that he became estranged from himself.