The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (35 page)

After leaving police headquarters, Olsen visited every hospital in the capital and for a hundred miles around. There were not many of them, but at each one he had to ‘give a donation to the hospital’ in order to be shown the admission lists. It turned out to be quite futile, as all cases brought in by the military were entered under the wrong sex, the wrong nationality, and the wrong name. He even found one entry which said ‘Pato Donald’ and another which said ‘Raton Miguel’.

Olsen wrote to the President through the Norwegian Ambassador, and told him that if his daughter was not released within ten days he would inform the national press, the Norwegian press, and the press in the United States. The President’s office replied immediately that the heads of all the security forces had been instructed to find her, giving her case top priority. Olsen could not understand this, as he had already told the President’s office exactly where Regina was, and who had taken her. In the following ten days he received these letters:

Olsen left the country without telling anyone and went to the United States, where he received a lot of help and good advice from Senators and Congressmen of the Democratic Party, and then flew on to Norway. A few days later a large gang of armed
men wearing anomalous-looking trilbys burst into his flat in its plush suburb and, not finding Olsen, shot his cleaning maid instead.

Back in Europe, Olsen campaigned tirelessly. His Holiness The Pope wrote three times asking Regina’s whereabouts; the American Secretary of State demanded the same information when he arrived on an official visit; the International Free Church Committee in Switzerland wrote, demanding to know; the Labour and the Democrat Parties in Great Britain wrote, demanding to know, as did the Socialists in France. To all of these, the President wrote to say that he was still looking.

Meanwhile, death went on as normal in the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. Colonel Asado had had a brilliant idea to save himself paperwork, and he and his men cruised around the city in their Ford Falcons looking for people who looked like subversives, drove the kind of cars that subversives drove, lived in the kinds of areas where subversives lived, and if they were good-looking women, so much the better, unless you were El Verdugo, who liked to sodomise young men as well.

One day Colonel Asado said to El Bano, ‘I bet you I can bring in a prettier woman than you!’

‘How much?’ replied El Bano, irked by the challenge.

‘One thousand pesos!’ exclaimed Asado.

‘I accept the bet!’ cried El Bano.

When El Bano returned with his catch, Asado was already raping in turn two little sixteen-year-olds with their arms tied behind their backs, and their faces streaming with tears. El Bano watched them sobbing and said to Asado, ‘OK, you win.’

In the meantime the embassies of foreign nations were becoming ever more sceptical about the President’s stock reply to their enquiries about missing persons; the President would always say that they were the victims of the internal feuding of the left wing. Then someone in the American embassy began to keep statistics and realised that people vanished in batches: fourteen Liberal Christians, four progressive Catholics, seven nuns of the ‘third-world’ movement, twenty prostitutes, forty-one
Rosicrucians, fifty-three Trade Unionists, twenty-five homosexuals, nineteen hippies, five artists, eleven journalists, four film producers, four magazine editors, seven authors, eight Evangelists, three Anglicans, eleven Mormons, thirty-five Jehovah’s Witnesses, eight Hare Krishna devotees, two from the Divine Light Mission, eighty-five Socialists, sixty Democrats, forty from the Vanguard Party, thirty-three from the National Party, twenty from the Liberal Democratic Party, forty-one from the Radical Party, eighteen from the Christian Democrats, forty-three from the Social Democrats, two thousand, one hundred and fourteen from the Communist Party, sixty-six from the Human Rights Movement, one thousand, five hundred and sixty-three from the Women’s Rights organisations, one hundred pacifists, one hundred from the Anti-Nuclear League, twenty-two Rotarians, nine hundred and three from the Marxist Front, twenty scoutmasters, and nearly two thousand Jews and Zionists. The remaining category, who disappeared regularly, and not in batches, was ‘young women’.

The United States Embassy sent copies of this list to the other major embassies, who sent copies of it home to their respective Foreign Offices, and the President one morning found himself deluged with official formal protests from other countries about ‘organised totalitarian repression’. Even the Soviet Union protested, now that it had imported all the food it had been angling for, and only Great Britain lodged no protest as usual.

But the President had bigger worries of his own. In a country which fights no wars, where the life of the people is an offence to the obsessively ordered mind of the military, and where government is so chaotic and corrupt that most civilians would prefer a military government, it is a top priority to find something for the military to do, in order to prevent them concocting a coup. The President was occupying himself with trying to find an external enemy, and to this end he was reading his way through piles of history books, and keeping the state archivist busy by ordering him to check through all the old
treaties that had not been destroyed by mould or termites, been burnt by being used to light the gasfire, or been sold to American universities. He found that in 1611 his country had owned a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which had been captured by English privateers and claimed for King James, and which, since then, had remained the property of the British. The President consulted the collection of the
National Geographic
magazine in the State University Library, and discovered that the island was uninhabited except by turtles, lizards, wild pigs, seals, wild goats, sea-bird colonies, finches, and a ship-wrecked sailor from New Zealand who now lived there as a hermit.

The President consulted his astrologer, his Tarot card reader, and the Chiefs of Staff, who were all unanimous in approving the plan, and accordingly the President released to the press his ‘Carta Historica’ which is still printed in full and with pride in the nation’s history books.

The British had no idea that Endeavour Island was known in Spanish as ‘Pigs Island’, and failed to realise that it was Crown Property that was about to be invaded. But the armed forces and the nation were united in war-fever. Everywhere graffiti and posters sprang up proclaiming ‘¡Los Puercos Son Los Nuestros!’ and crowds gathered in the square outside the Presidential Palace shouting and chanting, flushed with patriotic fervour. It did not matter that no one knew where the island was, what mattered was becoming euphoric and drunk, and even embracing policemen and soldiers. Never had a nation been so united, and even Asado gave his victims a day off from being tortured and raped.

The President informed the Chiefs of Staff that the island would be heavily defended, and that a very large force would be needed to stage a successful attack. Accordingly, the Navy, which had only two battle-cruisers (American, survivors of World War II), and four frigates (coal-fired, British, built in the 1920s), commandeered five merchantmen to transport the soldiers and the coal needed for the frigates. The Air Force realised that the island was out of range of its aircraft, and accordingly had huge fuel tanks mounted beneath either wing of its aircraft, which could be jettisoned when empty. The Army realised that its huge provisions warehouses were empty because of black-marketeering, and hoped there would be enough food on the island when they arrived with five thousand conscripts (General Ramirez did not want to risk losing his regulars).

In the glorious battle that ensued, the Air Force lost ten planes. Two were lost on take-off because the pilots were not used to handling aircraft with a full load of bombs plus extra fuel tanks. Three were lost because the small explosive charges placed to jettison the extra tanks were in fact too large, and the wings were blown off. Three were lost because the pilots were unused to long-distance flying over the open sea, and they got lost, ran out of fuel, and crashed ignominiously into the waves. The final two were lost because they failed to identify themselves when flying low across the path of the USS
New
California.
They were brought down by guided missiles. The ten aircraft that reached La Isla De Los Puercos dropped their payload with immaculate precision and killed a large number of turtles.

The Navy arrived and shelled the island whilst the soldiers, seasick, starving, and covered from head to foot in coal dust, disembarked. They landed on both sides of the island with the intention of enclosing the defenders in an inescapable ring of attackers. They advanced boldly with the Navy’s shells crashing ahead of them, and sometimes among them, until the soldiers of the eastern side saw the soldiers of the western side coming over the crest towards them. At last, the enemy! A ferocious battle ensued that raged for four hours until the commanders’ radio-operators managed to speak to each other during a lull. A ceasefire was ordered, a victory declared, and the soldiers embraced each other, weeping and cheering. At the top of the hill the National Flag was raised as the many verses of the National Anthem were sung with unusual enthusiasm, and the army made camp.

Nine hundred and forty men were killed, and roughly two thousand were injured. The soldiers stayed on the island until all the animals were eaten, and then the Navy took them home. They arrived, seasick, starving, and covered once more from head to foot in coal-dust, to a heroes’ welcome. They were fed for nothing in restaurants, entertained for nothing by prostitutes, and feted unsparingly by rapturous crowds during a week-long national holiday. The press printed banner headlines: ‘!
AHORA LOS PUERCOS SON VERDADERAMENTE LOS NUESTROS
!’ (Now the Pigs are Truly Ours!) and nine hundred and forty soldiers’ names were read out at the State Service of Remembrance, plus ten names of the Air Force, and one name of a Navy man who had died in a boiler explosion on one of the frigates. Nine hundred and fifty families were promised generous state pensions which for some reason that they could never understand they were unable to extract from the bureaucracy.