The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (30 page)

One day the men brought in a young woman, very smartly dressed, beautifully made-up and very self-confident. She smiled at him confidingly and sat down. ‘Now what can I do for you?’ she said.

For some reason she made the Colonel nervous just by the way she looked at him. He began to question her about subversion but she just gazed back at him and continued to smile that confiding smile.

‘What do I have to do to get out of here?’ she asked. ‘I think I’d do practically anything.’ She had put on a sexy drawl, and said ‘anything’ in a manner so enticing that the Colonel shivered.

‘Anything?’ he said.

‘Oh, yes, anything,’ she replied.

They looked at each other for a moment, and then she stood up, walked to the door, and turned the key. She returned to the Colonel and came very close to him. She put her lips to his ear and whispered hotly, ‘Just tell me what I can do for you, and then let me go.’ She leaned back and smiled brightly, looking at him. She began to toy with the buttons of his shirt, and he began to feel aroused. She was wearing something musky and
sultry. She turned away and glanced at him over her shoulder. Then she kicked off her high-heels and began to undress very slowly just to tease him. He watched fascinated, horrified and confused. His heart began to beat faster, and he felt a little weak. When she was naked she turned round and displayed herself to him, raising her arms and doing a little pirouette. ‘Do you like it?’ she said.

‘Madame, I must ask you to put your clothes on,’ he said stiffly.

‘Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport,’ she said, and she drew very close to him and started to undo his shirt buttons. She pouted.

‘Madame,’ he said, ‘I must warn you . . .’

‘Oh, sh,’ she went, and sealed his lips with a forefinger. She began to undo the buttons of his fly, and slipped in a cool elegant hand. Against his will he felt himself harden and swell, and he began to breathe in gasps. She draped herself across the desk and held out her arms to him. ‘Madame . . .’

‘Oh come on,’ she pouted again, ‘be a bad boy for once.’

He clambered on top of her but felt so awkward and ridiculous that his erection failed him. He struggled with himself, but soon climbed off, feeling disgusted and humiliated. ‘Just get out of here,’ he said angrily.

‘Oh, don’t be angry,’ she said, adopting the voice of a mother soothing a child over a hurt. ‘I was only trying to give you a good time.’

She began to dress efficiently, and the Colonel’s erection came back again at the thought of what he was about to miss. He went up behind her and spun her round, ripped off her panties, and lifted her onto the edge of the desk. He drove himself into her and came in a few short jerks as she clung to him with her arms around his neck and her legs locked around his back.

When she had left he looked at her file; it said ‘Call-Girl; known to associate with Trade Union Officials in a business capacity.’

So he had just had a free one from a hooker. He was deeply enraged and humiliated. It had all been completely sordid.

But it changed the way that he looked at his women prisoners. As he questioned them and felt his power over them, his penis would harden and the hairs on his legs would tingle. He began to feel like a god, and he began to feel that the women were disposable and usable, to be squashed like flies. But no more women offered themselves to him, and he began to grow impatient. One day he gave in to himself.

She was a pretty, bright-eyed sociology student of nineteen with blue eyes and brown curls. She said she did not know anything, and he lost his temper as nowadays he always did. He struck her across the side of the head and sent her crashing to the floor. He looked at her sobbing there, helpless and whimpering, and he drew his belt out of the guides of his trousers and lashed at her as she writhed and screamed on the carpet. ‘Tell me, damn you!’ he shouted. ‘Tell me!’

‘But,’ she said, in between sobs, ‘I don’t know anything!’

He kneeled down and turned her over. Her mascara had run down her face with her tears. He tore open her shirt and pulled her brassière above her breasts. ‘You had better tell me,’ he said, as he kneaded them with his hands.

‘Oh God,’ she moaned in despair, and she lay there sobbing helplessly as he unzipped her jeans and pulled them off, and then her underwear. She lay motionless and continued to weep as he raped her.

From then on the Colonel raped nearly all the women who came through his office, especially the young and pretty ones, and then he locked them up. Sometimes he raped the prettiest ones several times before leaving them to his workforce, who had all developed the same habits as himself. The Colonel did not care any more. He had complete power. He knew he could do anything at all.

The Colonel got into the routine of beating up all his prisoners. They told him lies first for the sake of having something to tell him, but he did not care any more about that either. He just arrested those implicated and beat them up too. He discovered that people have a particular horror of having their faces disfigured, especially girls, and he began to keep a
poker permanently stuck into the gas-fire. He learned that the prisoners referred to him as ‘Asado’ – it means ‘angry’ and it also means ‘barbecue’. The name gave him grim satisfaction, and he did not mind when his colleagues addressed him by it. On the lips of the prisoners it bespoke his power, and on the lips of his colleagues it bespoke ease and familiarity. His three comrades were already known as ‘El Electricista’, who like to question people with the aid of a cattle prod, ‘El Verdugo’ (the hangman), who employed the strappado, and ‘El Bano’, who liked to drown people.

It was impossible to send all the people home after their treatment, and so the ones who did not die under torture were usually shot through the vertebrae of the neck, as it was not too messy. Eventually the sports field of the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers would not contain any more bodies, and so the Colonel began to explore alternatives. He had a crematorium built, and he had some bodies dumped at cemeteries, where they were buried as ‘Non Nombre’. He commandeered an Army Transport Plane and dumped bodies over the jungle, where their deaths were blamed on terrorists – these were known as ‘free-falls’. Some he had dumped out to sea, but he stopped this when the tide brought them into holiday resorts in embarrassing numbers.

Very soon the newspapers were full of stories about people being abducted by armed thugs in Ford Falcons, people who disappeared and were never seen again. Relatives began to deliver habeas corpus writs to the police, who were confused by the whole thing. ‘We cannot honour your writs,’ they would say, ‘as we have no records of ever having arrested them.’ Colonel Asado put a stop to all this by arresting any journalist who reported the disappearances, and any relatives who kicked up a fuss. They soon got the message, especially when the Navy and the Air Force got in on the game as well. A silent terror descended upon the capital city of the nation.

Colonel Asado opened four more centres and had sixty people working for him. He grew very rich by selling the possessions of those who vanished, by discovering that General Ramirez
never bothered to check through the invoices that he sent him, and by accepting money, before he killed them, from those who attempted to buy their freedom.

La Estancia

Ma chère Maman,

I have so much news, Maman, since I last wrote, that I scarcely know where to begin! I do hope that my last letter did not depress you too much; I was myself formidably depressed at the time, but things have much improved since then, mostly because I now have some hope for Françoise.

Do you remember that I mentioned a brujo (a sort of sorcerer) called Pedro? Some people call him ‘El Legatero’ because he knows how to catch alligators alive. You may remember that he told Françoise to eat raw coral snakes for her cancer, but she refused to eat more than one, and her remission went into reverse.

Well, he came back a few days ago and told me that he and an Indian were holding a special healing session in the village where he comes from, and he invited us to come along. He said, ‘You should both come because the Senora’s illness is half because of you.’ I was very puzzled, and did not know whether to be insulted or whether to find this ridiculous. However, I did not dare to say anything because the man was very serious, and has a kind of mystique about him that is positively awesome. He is very tall and lean, with muscles on his arms like a Foreign
Legion physical training instructor, and he dresses in clothes he makes himself from the animals he catches. He once caught a rogue jaguar for Don Pedro (the man with the aeroplane) and shot it through the eye to stop the skin being damaged. How anyone could shoot so well with an old musket, I cannot understand. Anyway, he is very grizzled and dignified, and I confess that his invitation seemed more like an order.

Françoise was very weak and tired, and I nearly did not take her on the night concerned. But in the end we drove fifteen kilometres to the village over the most appalling dirt tracks, and when we arrived I found it in a state of siege, except without any besiegers. There were ramparts across the street, draped with barbed wire, and everyone, even the women and children, were armed to the teeth. I asked a woman what was going on and she said, ‘We are waiting for the soldiers.’ I asked her if they were communist revolutionaries or something, and she looked at me as if I were mad and burst out laughing. But at least she showed me the way to the healing session.

It was in an awful dingy little choza (the kind of hut you see in the Andes), and when we went in I could not see anything at first except the fire burning in the middle. A voice said, ‘Sit down,’ and I realised it was Pedro, the sorcerer. He was naked except for a loin cloth, and he looked very sinister with his face half in shadows and the flames glowing red on his body. He said, ‘Have you eaten no meat, no sugar, and no salt?’ and I said, ‘No, we have not.’

He told us to tell him about our illnesses and the woman next to me said that she was a prostitute (forgive me for mentioning such a thing) and that in plying her trade she had developed a bad back. She said her name was Dolores. Then there was a man called Misael, who looked a bit like Pedro, tall and muscly, and about the same age. He said he was there instead of his baby son who had terrible burn scars. I thought this was a little strange, but everyone seemed to take it as normal that you could be healed on someone else’s behalf. There was an Indian who said his name was Aurelio, a very strange-looking character, with a mongoloid face, a long queue of hair, and very
short and stocky. He said he was there to help Pedro with the spirits. He kept having bits of conversation with someone completely invisible to the rest of us, whom he addressed as ‘Gwubba’. I thought he was probably half-mad, if not completely so.

Pedro and the Indian both lit huge cigars, and then filled a gourd with stuff they call ‘ayahuasca’; I think it is a Quechua word, but I do not know what it means. They made each one of us drink a whole gourdful while Pedro chanted and the Indian rattled a rattlesnake’s rattle. The tea tasted very foul, and I nearly choked; it was greasy and bitter and bit at the back of the throat.

We sat there for about an hour whilst they chanted and rattled, and suddenly Aurelio said, ‘The spirits are here.’ At exactly that moment I began to feel very nauseous, and so did Françoise. My heart was racing and I was suddenly completely disorientated. I could not sit upright any more because I could not tell which was the floor or the roof or the walls. I could not see anything either, because stripes and blobs of bright colours, especially blue, kept floating across my eyes and big balls of fluffy purple light were shooting towards me and then shooting away. At one second the walls of the hut were so close that I could not breathe, and the next they were kilometres away so that I felt as small as an ant. I was pouring with perspiration, and my lungs would not co-operate.

Then I found myself back at home sitting under the bougainvilleas, admiring the moon, then I was back in France as a child, trying to pick a fig that was too high up for me to reach, and then I was back in the hut, but I could not see the others. I tried to crawl around to find them, but the floor kept tilting so that I just slid around, and at one point everything turned upside-down so that I was crawling on the ceiling. But I felt so heavy that I could barely move at all, and when I cried ‘au secours’ I emitted only a strangled yelp.

Eventually everything calmed down, and there they were, still chanting and rattling. I was just thinking, ‘Thank God it is over,’ when they began to turn into animals. They were oxes,
llamas, vizcachas, jaguars, ocelots, toucans, and caimans, and they swapped from one to the other with such rapidity and suddenness that I forgot my alarm and watched with a kind of hypnotised fascination. At one point I saw a beautiful young girl with hair down to her waist, standing behind the Indian with her hands on his shoulders.

When that was all over, Pedro moved over to Françoise, who was flat on her back. He opened her shirt and exposed her breasts, a sight so gruesome that I cannot bear to think of it. Pedro took the flesh of one breast into his mouth and sucked very hard on it. Then he came away and started to salivate into the fire. Believe me, Maman, his saliva turned into a scorpion that landed in the embers, scuttled about, and then shrivelled into ashes. He repeated this procedure on the other breast, and spat, of all things, a snake a metre long into the fire, where it writhed as it burned away. Then he came to me and sucked cactus spines out of my belly!

At that point I passed out, and when I woke up, Aurelio and Pedro were starting the whole thing again, and we had to drink more ayahuasca. I was reeling from the effects when I realised that I could see everything out of the back of my head. I actually turned away from them in order to watch. Then Aurelio said something to me with a voice so deep and macabre that I fainted from terror, and did not wake up again until morning, with my mouth feeling like an old boot filled up with Parmesan cheese.