The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (29 page)

Parlanchina appeared at the edge of the clearing and beckoned to her father. He laid down the maize-planting stick he was whittling and followed her as she wended in and out of the trees. Every few paces she stopped and looked at him, beckoning with sorrowful urgency. Aurelio hurried in her wake.

In Latin-America they call it the tigre, but it is not a tiger, except in fierceness and courage. The largest jaguars are nearly two metres long, not including the splendid striped tail. It is like a leopard but is far more solidly built, with a massive head and powerful legs, and usually its coat is golden-brown in colour, with black spots on the legs and black rosettes on the flanks. Sometimes there are pure white cats, and very rarely indeed there are beautiful godlike cats of velvet black. These latter confer chieftainship upon warriors of some Indian tribes when they are slain by that warrior in single combat and their pelts
are taken from them and worn with dignity. The black jaguar is sacred and mighty, and the Indians consider it the bravest.

The jaguar hunts according to the natural advantages of its habitat. In Argentina, on the pampas, it kills sheep and cattle. By rivers it catches fish and turtles. In forests it shreds the flesh of the tapir. In the jungle it lies motionless upon the branches and leaps upon monkeys and birds. Often it lies upon a branch above a path, because animals, like men, prefer to travel by the easiest ways. But jaguars do not often attack men; they have acquired the wisdom to pass him by, for he is the most dangerous animal on earth.

Federico walked on, glimpsing the sparkling birds in audacious colours shrieking in the trees, watching the monkeys crashing away from him through the branches. Sweat poured down his brow and stung his eyes just as mosquitoes stung his arms and his neck. He was beginning to think of going back. He paused on the path and above him a tigre growled its coughing growl.

Federico started back, startled, and slipped onto his back, twisting his ankle. He half-rose to his feet and scrabbled desperately to unsling his rifle. The great black tigre arched its back and opened its mouth; it hissed and snarled from the depth of its chest, and looked around for a chance to escape, thinking quickly where to leap. In wild panic Federico raised the M.16 to his shoulder, aimed it clumsily at the cat’s head and pulled the trigger. Federico’s already racing heart accelerated yet further as nothing happened. He had forgotten to release the safety catch; he had to look at the unfamiliar weapon to find it. His eyes, in his desperation, passed over it twice before he identified it and released it with his sweating and shaking fingers. He remembered to cock it. The cat looked at him again, hissing, as though telling him to leave, but Federico raised the gun once more to his shoulder, and fired at the cat’s head. But the gun was neither supported nor aimed as it should have been, and the bullet sped harmlessly from the wavering barrel to strike chips from the branch above the cat’s head. As the bullet ricocheted away the cat flinched flat on its stomach against the
branch, and then rose furiously to its feet and crouched to spring.

Federico wildly tried to fire again. But this time the self-loading mechanism had jammed, and Federico was still struggling with his unfamiliar rifle and its unfamiliar slide when the tigre, its eyes blazing with hatred and magnificent furious courage, leapt from the branch. Its huge paws landed squarely against Federico’s shoulders and bowled him over backwards. The tigre sank in its claws, and with one cut of its teeth ripped out Federico’s throat.

Federico died as if in a dream. A great silence rose up in his soul and he felt nothing of the pain in his body. He thought for a second of Francesca, and how beautiful she had become. He thought of Sergio, and of how he had been forgiven for stealing from his own father. He thought with pity of the man he had killed whom he had not saved from the vultures. He thought of the vulture he had killed for Profesor Luis. He thought of his mother making arepas.

‘I tried to prevent you,’ said the voice that was not Remedios’ voice. Whether Federico opened his eyes and saw Parlanchina, or whether he saw her only in the dream of his death it is not possible to say. But she stood over him, her brown eyes filled with tears, her long hair falling about her face. ‘You are the girl of my dream,’ he said. ‘You are the wild beautiful girl of the forest.’

She smiled, ‘Like me, you have died a virgin. I tried to prevent you. But you pushed me aside. I have come to lead you.’

Federico saw how beautiful she was; he saw that her skin was soft and perfect, how her breasts were budding, how long and straight were her legs. She held out her hand to help him up, and he went with her, without seeing how the tigre was tearing his body which had been as exquisite and as perfect as Parlanchina’s. He did not see or hear Aurelio speak sharply to the cat so that it slunk away. He saw only Parlanchina by his side, leading him by the hand, looking at him sideways and smiling the smile of one who knows mischievous secrets.

Aurelio dug out the extremities of Parlanchina’s grave. He
saw that her bones were white and clean as they lay in the tunnel of the bed of brush. He saw also that the bones of her beloved cat were clean and had fallen among the bones of his mistress. The termites had performed their task well. Aurelio lay Federico’s body with Parlanchina’s, and he looked one last time at the slim long limbs and the adolescent face tanned dark with the mountain sun. He pushed the body nearer to the others’ so that their bones would fall together and intermingle.

He closed the grave and thought about how he had first seen Federico when he was a boy and had killed an innocent man by accident, and he thought about how Parlanchina had followed him in the jungle.

‘Gwubba,’ he accused her, ‘did you lead him to death, because you love him?’

‘No, Papacito,’ she said. ‘I tried to prevent him. But some things one cannot prevent. He came to his death because he loved me.’

Aurelio looked into her dark, glowing eyes to be certain that she told the truth. She smiled at him with both sadness and happiness.

‘Then you did not marry a god?’

‘No, Papacito.’

WHEN THE COLONEL
returned to work the next morning he opened the door of the radical lawyer’s cell and was appalled by the stench of stale urine that assaulted his nostrils. The lawyer was sitting on the edge of the mattress, a picture of abjection, with blood still caked on his lips and chin.

‘Get out!’ said the Colonel, ‘and remember who are the right people to respect in future.’

‘Respect?’ said the lawyer, looking up. ‘How is it possible to respect men of violence?’

‘You are the first man I have ever struck,’ replied the Colonel, ‘and I did it not as a soldier, but as a man.’

The radical lawyer laughed bitterly. ‘You want information out of me about people who are struggling for a better world, so that you can keep it as it is. You are prepared to beat people up to achieve that. You are a fascista!’

The Colonel said nothing. He went out and locked the door. He returned a few minutes later with a bucket and a mop. ‘Before you go,’ he said, ‘clean up this mess.’

‘I refuse,’ said the lawyer. ‘It was not my fault that I was locked up in here with no toilet.’

The Colonel roughly shoved the mop in the man’s hands and said, ‘You clean it up or you don’t go.’ Then he left, locking the door behind him, and went to his first interview.

Today he found it much easier to bully and browbeat the frightened people who arrived. One woman, a teacher, he slapped across the face, and that evening there were three people locked up for not giving information, including the lawyer, who had mopped up his room, but had threatened the Colonel with litigation for false imprisonment. The Colonel did not know what to do with him, fearing that the man would sue, and that he would end up in front of the firing squad.

As he drove home he was thinking, ‘The man’s a worm, an insect, the very kind of dregs who ferment anarchy and destroy the Motherland.’ He remembered what General Ramirez had said about removing subversives from circulation ‘permanently’, and he thought, ‘Well, this creep is a genuine subversive, all right.’ He decided to do his patriotic duty, but it caused him to sleep not at all that night.

In the morning he shot the man in the chest, even though his hands were shaking and the act revolted him. When it was dark he carried the limp corpse out and dumped it in the capacious boot of his Ford Falcon. He drove out of town and left it on the municipal rubbish tip, where he covered it over with rubbish. During the night the scavenging strays that lived off the tip uncovered the body, and when the disposal workers found it in the morning it was already half-eaten by dogs. It got only a column inch in the local paper, and the body was unidentified. It was buried with a small wooden cross at its head which said ‘Non Nombre’.

The Colonel was relieved on his own behalf, and he also had a brainwave. He consulted the deceased’s file and confirmed that he had been registered as living alone. He decided to go through the man’s flat to see if he could find any information there about those subversive clients.

He had to force the door with a jemmy when no one was looking, but he got in without any trouble, and found that the flat was a tip. There were ashtrays full of cigarette ends, dirty clothes scattered about the floor, an unmade bed whose sheets had obviously not been changed for weeks. The Colonel went to the man’s desk and, in another brainwave, he stuck a piece of
paper in the typewriter and tapped, ‘I can’t stand it any more. I’m leaving.’

The Colonel went through the desk and took any papers that looked as though they might be useful. Then he found himself looking at the books on the man’s shelves; he saw books like
Das Kapital
, Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
and Reich’s
The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
He thought, ‘I was right to kill that slime.’

The Colonel searched the rest of the man’s apartment, and in a drawer by the man’s bedside table he found a gold ring with a tiger’s eye set in it. He took it out. ‘That must be worth something,’ he thought, and then put it back. A minute later he opened the drawer and took it out again. ‘Why not?’ he said out loud. ‘The bastard won’t need it now.’ He put it in his pocket, and instantly felt very guilty. He took it out again and looked at it with the intention of putting it back in the drawer, but instead he put it on his little finger and left it there.

As he left he noticed that he had badly damaged the door with the jemmy, and thought, ‘Since this looks like a burglary, I’ll have to make the whole place look like a burglary.’ He went back in and carefully strewed the contents of the flat about the floor; somehow it still did not seem right, so he gave up trying to arrange it as an artist’s impression of burglary, and threw everything around as violently as he could. That looked a lot better.

Later that day, the Colonel decided that it was time to recruit more interrogators because it was going to take an eternity to get through all the files on his own. He recruited three comrades from his own regiment, with the permission of the General, who promoted all of them. The General then summoned the Colonel.

‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘I am concerned, having read your reports, that things are not being done as thoroughly as I would like. It seems that you are bringing people in by sending them postcards. I appreciate that this is economical, but I also think that anyone who turns up having received a postcard could not possibly be a real subversive.’

‘No, General,’ replied the Colonel, ‘but I wished to be thorough, and it occurred to me that the perfect way to disguise the fact that one is a subversive is to behave as though one is not. I think it is better to be sure, Sir.’

‘I see,’ said the General.

‘Also, I have,’ continued the Colonel, ‘already detected one such subversive, and his case is, ah . . . terminated, Sir.’

‘Very good,’ said the General. ‘But I think perhaps you should concentrate more on those who fail to turn up at all. And another thing . . .’

‘Yes, Sir?’

‘If cases are to be “terminated”, as you put it, I don’t like the idea of people receiving your postcards, which can be found later by relatives. Do you catch my meaning?’

‘Yes, Sir,’ said the Colonel.

‘I think it better if you were to arrive at their residence in plain clothes, and escort them to the School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. I suggest they should be blindfolded so that they do not know where they are taken.’ The General put on a wise and confiding tone of voice. ‘Between you and me, Colonel, I should tell you that psychologically this is an efficient way to proceed, because if your interviewees are a little frightened they will be more likely to give you information. In the line of duty, Colonel, one sometimes has to frighten people, however distasteful it may be.’

‘Yes, Sir,’ said the Colonel.

‘And another thing. You really must expand the operation somewhat. I want you to form proper task-forces. And don’t worry about the cost.’ General Ramirez waggled a finger. ‘Just send all the invoices to me and I will deal with them through the Army Benevolent Fund and the Army Widows’ Pension Investment Scheme.’

The Colonel instructed each of his three comrades to recruit four more ideologically reliable people, and soon his interview centre was full of activity. The twelve men recruited by his comrades went to bring in the subversives in teams of four, usually after dark, and the Colonel and his three comrades
would interview them. The Colonel began to notice that the suspects often arrived in a badly-beaten and shocked state, but the men told him they had put up violent resistance to being escorted, and that they had had no choice. ‘Very good,’ said the Colonel, who was picking up some of General Ramirez’ mannerisms and turns of phrase.

The trouble was that you could not return badly-beaten people to their homes to complain that they had been arrested and abused by the Secret Police. The Colonel simply kept them at the centre, and soon it was severely overcrowded. The whole situation was beginning to get on his nerves, with having to organise meal rotas, bathing rotas, lavatory-visiting rotas, invoicing and interviewing and getting nowhere, and, worst of all, having to listen all day to people banging on their doors, shouting about their rights, and weeping. Sometimes when he could not stand it any more, he went into the cells and kicked them about until they shut up.