The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (36 page)

When the British finally realised what had happened, and a
task force of Royal Marines arrived, they found only a lot of animals skeletons and an old hermit from New Zealand who was using an unfamiliar Latin-American flag as a cloak.

The President calculated somewhat arbitrarily that he had reduced the chances of a coup by ten per cent. He called a snap election which he would have won on the ‘Los Puercos Victory Vote’ even if he had not taken the precaution of filling the ballot boxes in advance. The country’s few demographers noted wearily and cynically that the population had yet again appeared to double in the five years between elections.

ON THE 28TH
of October 1746 the citizens of Lima had just celebrated the feast of St Simon and St Jude. It was a beautiful night of the full moon, and the earthquake totally destroyed the city in three minutes, killing six thousand. The ocean retreated for two miles, and the ensuing tidal wave rushed in and destroyed Callao. In 1647, on the 13th of May, two thousand were killed by an earthquake in Santiago. On the 31st of March 1650 an earthquake lasting a quarter of an hour obliterated the city of Cuzco and a priest hung for five days over a precipice, suspended by his ecclesiastical robes. An image of the Virgin torn apart in the Church of San Francisco miraculously repaired itself, and once in Lima a statue of St Peter turned face-about on its pedestal. In the village of Chapi-Chapi the image of the Virgin processed from its niche in the wall to the door of the chapel. When the priest tried to remove it to the village for safety, he was prevented by a hailstorm which ceased when he restored the Virgin to her niche.

The mountains along the western side of the Americas daily give birth to themselves with heroic pangs, convulsions, and contractions. As the continents drift westwards, the great plates of the planet grind, slide and slip, squashing the Pacific coast and compressing its mountains higher by the year. They rise faster even than they split and flake in the frosts and are
ground down by the ice of glaciers, the scouring of the dusty wind, and the buffeting of the hail. The great chain of mountains, of which the travailing Andes form five thousand miles, are like a Leviathan in the throes of tormented constipation and agonising gripes of wind. The titanic pressure upon the bowels and sphincters of the earth produces the most gargantuan haemorrhoids, the most prodigious fistulas and the most formidable colonic prolapses imaginable by God or man. Valleys disappear beneath torrents of mud, crevasses open and close, rivers change course, and the mountains are thrown ever higher. The passes are so high that once upon a time the only sensible way to get from Lima to Iquitos was to take several months by steamer, via Liverpool, for the price of sixty pounds sterling.

If the Andes are the bilious excrement of a planet’s indigestion, what a palace of pure beauty they are also! They beckon with promises of solitude and peace, with whispers of gold, silver, lead, copper, clean waters, aphrodisiac air, lost civilisations and hidden prelapsarian gardens of innocence.

After the massacre at Chiriguana, Remedios and the entire population knew that they would never again know peace and isolation. They knew that sooner or later whole armies would descend upon them to pillage, sack and rape, and render their victory hollow with their vengeance. They knew that next time there would be tanks and gunships, howling jets; and not demoralised conscripts but the élite regulars who guarded the portachuelos on the borders. Everyone knew that it was time to leave and start a new life elsewhere. Many left to join relations in other areas, but two thousand people joined the small army of those who were to go into exile in the mountains, cross the border, and start anew in some forgotten valley of safety. Remedios and her guerrilleros, having seen, dealt, heard and smelt total war at first hand, gave up their dream of armed victory and joined the dream for the start of a new creation, a new world, and a better way of life. But they took their own and the soldiers’ weapons with them, in case of external threat and from force of habit. Don Emmanuel went to see Don Hugh, Don
Pedro, and the French couple, and advised them to leave before the invasion broke upon them with the force of a holocaust. Don Hugh and Don Pedro flew to the capital; Antoine and Françoise with their children, but without ever knowing why, joined the refugees for the sake of their vision of elysium and because of Don Emmanuel’s enthusiasm. If it did not work out, they could still return to France.

The preparations for departure took two weeks. Every possible item of food, tool, utensil, household good and object of sentimental value was packed up in bundles ready to load onto the animals. Don Emmanuel and Hectoro organised parties of vaqueros to round up all his herds and those of the people who were also leaving. Unashamedly he rustled all of Don Hugh’s and Don Pedro’s horses and cattle, knowing that they would rebuild their herds on insurance money and governmental reparations.

The whole area became a scene of chaotic last-minute packings, unpackings, discardings and retrievals, hampered by the antics of the cats, who took it as a matter of course that all this was a game for their amusement. Hectoro became so maddened by their incursions into his luggage that he shot one at close range; the animal blinked at him and patted at the tassels of his machete scabbard and the leather draw-strings of his bombachos. Realising that the animals were indestructible, Hectoro put away his revolver and resigned himself to their quirky attentions.

Don Emmanuel and his men roped the horses together from the halter in hierarchical order, with his grey stallion at the front. He did the same with the mules and donkeys. At the front of each string of cattle he placed a bull, and at the front of the foremost string of cattle he put Cacho Mocho, the bull with the broken horn, who was the undisputed king of all the local bulls, a veritable giant who was the only bull who had been allowed into Don Emmanuel’s garden to eat the flowers, and was as gentle as a virgin’s touch. The chickens were to be carried in boxes on the pack animals, and the goats were to be driven in flocks, being too wilful and excitable to rope together. The dogs, they knew, would follow anyway.

At dawn on the day of departure the thousands of animals were loaded with the impedimenta of exile, and by midday the work was completed. Each person was assigned responsibility for an equal section of the train, and then when the heat and humidity grew too oppressive and people became tetchy and irritated, everyone retired for siesta, except for Dona Constanza and Gonzago, who went to make love furiously by the Mula, and Profesor Luis and Farides, who went to make love more gently and decorously on the table in the schoolhouse.

When everybody re-emerged in the early evening, the cats were once more febrile and jumpy, and the animals were plainly close to panic. It was difficult to get them all moving, and they were almost impossible to control. Dust rose in asphyxiating fogs, loads fell off and were replaced amidst oaths and expletives, people’s feet were trodden on by hoofs, mules lay down and refused to move, and cats darted among their feet, or hitched rides on the other animals, digging in their claws to stay seated and making the animals snort and rear and roll their eyes with anxiety at the pricking in their necks.

That evening the pilgrims made camp on the edge of the savannah, and the lorries, armoured cars and tanks began to roll out, column after column, from Valledupar. In one of the lorries sat Figueras with his platoon of twenty men, demoted to Lieutenant, and stripped of his decorations despite having personally arrested a demented terrorist with bagfuls of identity discs who had wandered through the gates of the headquarters with a cat in his arms.

Early in the morning the animals were close to panic again as Aurelio led the column through the jungle. Up in the trees the monkeys whooped, crashing from branch to branch, and the toucans and their gaudy cousins shrieked and flew in circles. ‘Something is very wrong,’ said Aurelio, ‘the animals are unhappy with this path. With your permission we will go up this hill and walk along the ridges.’

‘It is all one to me,’ replied Pedro, and the column moved leftwards to climb the long gentle slope through the extravagant lush vegetation.

Don Emmanuel had an idea. He came up to the front and said, ‘I think we should cut a couple of trees across the path so that they have difficulty following us. Like this one.’ He pointed to a tall bushy tree by the pathside.

‘You start cutting it then,’ said Aurelio, and he and Pedro nudged and winked, and watched with eager amusement as Don Emmanuel drew his machete and swung it. The blade clanged against the bark and leapt back, ringing and quivering, and Don Emmanuel let it fall to the ground so that he could clutch his jarred wrist and fingers, and dance up and down grimacing. He bent forward to see that there was no mark on the tree, and looked up to see Aurelio and Pedro grinning.

‘That tree is a quebracha,’ said Aurelio. ‘The wood is so hard that it can be used for paving roads. Try another one.’

‘Quebracha?’ said Don Emmanuel. ‘An axe-breaker?’

‘And a machete-breaker too,’ said Pedro, handing Don Emmanuel his machete and pointing to the section that had chipped off at the edge.

‘You are both sons of whores,’ said Don Emmanuel bitterly. ‘This was my favourite machete.’

Don Emmanuel refused to be defeated. He walked beside Aurelio pointing out suitable trees to fell, and Aurelio was saying, ‘No, that is a rubber tree; it would be a waste. No, that is a brazil nut tree; it would be a waste. No, that is a sacred tree; it would offend Pachacamac.’

‘I give up,’ said Don Emmanuel. ‘Even though the animals are leaving piles of dung that even a blindman could follow.’

‘Try this one,’ said Pedro. ‘But do not even start cutting it until everyone is past.’

Don Emmanuel felled the balsa tree in a couple of minutes, and returned to the column with his honour satisfied.

Steadily they mounted the slopes of the escarpment, a long high hump of land that protruded at a height of three hundred metres far out into the jungle. At the top the people and the cats and the other animals sat in the sunshine drawing breath and revelling in the cool wind and fresher air. Below them they saw the thin strip of jungle between the mountains and the
savannah, and to the north the vast jungle, waving and green, that spread over the horizon. To their left arose the mountains, inviting but awesome, and to their right was discernible through binoculars the abandoned pueblo, abandoned Chiriguana, and the thin strip of the glistening Mula. The people looked back with nostalgia and regret upon the land of their birth, their labour, and their fiestas, and everyone was thinking, ‘One day we will return.’

The party was just picking itself up from the grass of the escarpment when the reason for the recent febrility of the cats and the whimsical obstreperousness of the pack-animals suddenly became very clear. There was a distant rumble and the earth began to shake beneath their feet, quivering from side to side like some vast lump of guava jelly. The people and the animals were thrown to their knees or onto their backs, and the cats leapt into their arms and clung on for salvation. The two thousand knelt, rocking with the tremors and with the terror, all reciting the litany of their sins at once, so that Father Garcia had to hear all of them simultaneously and grant mass-absolution amidst the rumbling and the babbling. Garcia calculated that the earthquake lasted for the exact duration of two Ave Marias and a Tota Pulchra Est.

The earthquake ended with gentle belches and gurgles in the entrails of the earth and the people, still crossing themselves, invoking angels and spirits, rose unsteadily to their feet. They looked out across the landscape and saw that their former homes were immersed in a shimmering and swirling sea of brilliant silver, for the sunshine was sparkling off the pale white dust raised by the vibrations of the earthquake. They did not know it, but their homes beneath the dust remained perfectly intact. ‘Ay! Ay! Ay!’ exclaimed the pilgrims, overcome with awe, and transfixed with the beauty of the sparkling sea on the plain. They had stood there a long time, watching the ocean of dust gently settling, when they heard a new sound of roaring and rushing. A kilometre away, above the valley in which they had formerly been travelling, a stupendous wall of water a hundred metres high suddenly burst between the cleft
of two mountains and travelled in a vast arc before crashing on to the jungle below and tearing it to matchsticks as it hurled apocalyptically down the Mula basin in an advance of majestic and godlike inexorability, throwing a mist of spray high into the air and roaring like herds of herculean bulls engaged in inconceivable prehistoric struggles.

Dumbstruck, the crowd stood and bore witness as the mighty spout of foaming and glistening water continued to dive unendingly from between the mountains. They watched the plain turn into a featureless muddy sea, glistening brightly and ever-spreading on to the horizons. Very gradually the colossal spout began to diminish, until two hours later it was a waterfall cascading into a lake.

Without many words the people made camp on the escarpment. As evening fell they walked around each others’ encampments, holding cats in their arms for comfort, and those who had wronged each other in the past and bore grudges apologised and embraced. Old friends shook hands, and people who had never talked in the past exchanged confidences. Such things are caused not by fear but by the revelation that there is nothing stable in the whole universe and that everything is finally a matter of chance, which can so suddenly throw the life of men into chaos. People find their protection withdrawn, and this cuts wounds in the hearts of those who never before have felt helpless and small, and shows to them how precious is everything temporary and mundane. In the presence of such momentous force, such indifferent callousness, such mindless and irresistible cataclysm, one knows with absolute knowledge what it is to be an ant inside an anthill when it is trodden on by the foot of a thoughtless man.

The vehicles at the front of the column of invaders found themselves driving into a rapidly rising flood. The whole column was halted and the Major General of the Portachuelo Guards came forward and surveyed the scene from the top of one of the lorries. ‘I have seen this sort of thing before,’ said the Major General. ‘That tremor shook something loose in the mountains and this is the result. We will have to turn about.’