The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (46 page)

He loaded the packs into the jeep and drove it the short distance to Maria’s stable near his office, and left them with her. Then he drove back to fetch his cat, and awaited Capitan Papagato’s arrival with his donkey and his four cats.

The Capitan arrived shortly in peasant clothing, and the two men and their donkeys walked off in silence together towards Chiriguana, their sombreros pulled low over their eyes, their cats prowling beside the road in the savannah, sometimes ambushing each other, and sometimes chasing their own tails.

‘I want to confess something to you,’ said the General at length.

‘Oh yes?’

‘I lied to you, Capitan. I have no medical discharge, I am deserting. I hope you are not shocked, but I have felt guilty ever since I told you that.’

The Capitan looked into the distance and removed his hat to fan his face. ‘Pretending to be insane is also a form of desertion,’ he said.

That evening they brewed sancocho under the stars and talked quietly. In the undergrowth around them the animals rustled and the cicadas scraped. The General smoked a puro with his coffee, and the Capitan said, ‘Now you really look the part of a campesino!’

‘You should try it,’ said the General. ‘And you will discover its beauty. There is nothing else on earth that wipes out troubles and clears the thoughts as well as one of these.’

‘Then perhaps you could spare one.’

‘Of course,’ said the General, and dug in his pack for a cigar.

Capitan Papagato lit it, and the delicate smoke drifted off into the night, mingling with the scent of bougainvilleas.

‘I feel drunk,’ said the Capitan after a while. ‘I hope I am not going to be sick.’

‘You will not be,’ replied the General. ‘The night is too beautiful for that.’ He paused. ‘Did you bring a tent, Capitan?’

‘Of course.’

‘Thank God. I knew I had forgotten something important. Even so, it is not the rainy season, and with good fortune we will not need it.’

That night, just after midnight, Comandante Domingo Hugo Galdos of General Ramirez’ unofficial section of the Army Internal Security Service was waiting for the guard to pass to the other end of his beat. The guard was obviously bored and tired, and had stopped to smoke an illicit cigarette in the cup of his hand, looking around a little anxiously in case the duty officer were to appear unexpectedly on a check.

Comandante Galdos had arrived by train in civilian clothes, carrying a briefcase in order to look like a businessman; but his dark glasses made him look exactly like a secret service agent, as did the ill-fit of his suit and the square ends of his shoes. Inside the briefcase was a very precise map of where to find General Fuerte’s quarters, a plan of the house, details of the movements of the guards, and a long-barrelled hand-gun with a silencer. He had been here in the bushes squatting in a very uncomfortable position, his feet cutting on the leather of the new shoes, his thighs aching, and being bled dry by mosquitoes for two hours, awaiting the ideal moment.

When the moment came he darted across the road from the bushes and up the steps of the General’s house. To his relief and surprise he found the door open, and slipped inside, walking straight into a rack that the General kept for walking sticks. Horrified by the racket he had made, his heart thumping and his stomach churning, Comandante Galdos stood absolutely still, listening to the terrifying silence.

Breathing more easily at last, he slipped a pencil torch from his pocket and flicked it on. He found the door handle to the bedroom and turned it very slowly. The door released with a sharp click, and once more he froze with panic and thought of fleeing. Then he opened the door and was horrified by its grating hinges. He stood still again. He crept into the room,
cursing the creaking of his new leather shoes, and shone his light onto the bed. Very quickly and sweating with fear he pumped four shots into the back of El Gandul as he lay on his side under the sheet. Desperately wishing to urinate, Comandante Galdos went swiftly back into the corridor and walked once more straight into the walking sticks. He cursed, gathered his wits together, and peeked out of the door. Seeing no sentries he darted back across to the bushes and ran off, falling headlong into an irrigation ditch. His hands bleeding from breaking his fall onto the stones, he lay there perspiring and shaking until he regained a little of his composure. He went back to the road and headed straight for a bar, where he drank four aguardientes in a row and smoked ten cigarettes. A whore sidled up to him, saw his bleeding hands and his wild eyes, and sidled away again.

Teodoro Mena Machicado, most experienced assassin of the Revolutionary Socialists (Turcos Lima Front), and known as El Amolador on account of always wearing a knife when on missions, arrived shortly after Comandante Galdos had left. He had hitched on lorries all the way from Isabel, and it had taken two days. He was tired and dirty but full of intent to do his revolutionary duty with the utmost firmness and self-sacrifice. He had so far executed seven senior officers on behalf of the people, and was intending General Fuerte to be his eighth. He was ignorant of the fact that so far he had executed no less than three officers with left-wing anti-American nationalist sympathies, three moderates, and only one right-winger. But as far as he was concerned they were all the same, and he was not a man to hedge with caveats and provisos when it came to disposing of class-enemies. Itching with revolutionary justice, that only he could distinguish from blood-lust, he waited in the bushes for the sentry to pass.

Finding his opportunity, excitement rising in his breast, he flitted across the road, sprang up the steps of the General’s house and tried the handle. He burst in, crashing straight into the walking sticks, and, not pausing to clutch his bruised shins, ran into the General’s bedroom. Drawing the lovingly-honed
butcher’s knife from his belt he threw himself on the body and frenziedly plunged it four times into its chest, slicing straight through the ribs. Then he withdrew it and wiped the blade on the sheet.

On impulse, he tugged at the shoulder of the corpse to roll it over, and in the bright moonlight pouring through the window, he saw the mutilated, caked and blood-clotted face of El Gandul, crawling with flies, maggots swarming in the open mouth. A nauseating stench suddenly filled his nostrils and made him cover his nose with his hand.

Stupefied and sickened, El Amolador backed off and ran. In the corridor he crashed once more into the walking sticks, and limped to the door clutching his knee. He watched for the sentry to pass and sprinted across the road to the bushes. He ran doubled-up for a few metres and then returned to the road.

Gratefully he entered the nearest bar and sat next to Comandante Galdos, who was already glassy-eyed and incoherent. El Amolador ordered a bottle of ron cana and drank it without the mediation of a glass or the addition of Inca-Cola, watching Galdos’ cigarette smoulder down to a stub until it burned two blisters on the man’s fingers.

Comandante Galdos stood up, wringing his hands, and shouting, ‘Mierda! Que maricon de puta! Jesus!’ El Amolador put a hand on his arm and pulled him back down on to his stool. ‘Have another drink, cabron.’

The two assassins of two political extremes drank with the thirst of elephants, swore eternal friendship, embraced, discussed the hyperbolical misery of their experiences of the love of women, related sexual exploits with degrees of poetic exaggeration, and were fast asleep with their heads on the counter when General Fuerte’s bomb lit up the night and shattered the peace with a resounding boom.

Neither of them awoke. In his unconscious state Comandante Galdos murmured, ‘O, que chucha!’ and El Amolador grunted swinishly and said, ‘What? Where?’

The zoological General slept blissfully under the stars, his arm over the neck of his purring cat, the only man who has been
assassinated in his absence three times in one night, once by himself, and who has lived to desert the army and go on an expedition.

ALMOST SINCE THE
inception of geological time there had been a long valley there, created by the folding of the Sierra and the inexorable abrasions of water. At the eastern end there had always been at either side two towering mountains rising vertically into the cordilleran sky. Then there had been, before humans had ever set foot there, a mighty earthquake that compressed the folds of the suffering earth even further and tilted the southern peak at an angle over the mouth of the valley so that its face overhung it and the river cascaded through it.

For hundreds of years the Incas lived in the valley of the hanging mountain, and built a stone city there with temples and ziggurats, courts for playing pok-a-tok where sometimes the losing teams were sacrificed, and geometrical paved streets lined with low houses and incised stone columns. At the western end of their city they erected stone effigies of jaguars to line the travellers’ ingress, and half-way up the northern slope they built the palace of their Lords.

Then one day there was a fierce rumbling and a woman working in a field pointed east and shouted. People ran into the streets and courtyards to watch wonderingly as at the edge of their world the overhanging face of the mountain split into fragments along its seams and slid crumbling and roaring to
build a huge dam across the exit of the river. With a great crack the final section of the mountainside split off and crashed to earth sending clouds of rock dust high into the air to be dispersed in the bitter winds.

The frantic people could not clear the dam faster than the waters rose. They heaved the rocks over the slope at the end of the valley, but many of them were too heavy to lift even with twenty men. They abandoned the uneven struggle when they began to fear that their route back might be cut off, and they left on a long trek in the direction of Cuzco, only to perish in the implacably hostile waste of the portachuelos. They were dead long before their valley had become a mighty lake that submerged their city and bore with relentless pressure against the dam, awaiting the time when the mountains would move again, the dam burst, and the waters break free to hurl joyfully through the quebradas, crash through the jungles, and spread out in the Mula basin, only to evaporate once more into the bosom of the sky of their birth.

Thus it was that the travellers beheld from the heights an intact city half-buried in alluvial mud, with glistening sheets of water in the hollows. They saw the ziggurat and the temples, the palace of the Lords, the roofs of the little houses, and the jaguar obelisks lining the road of ingress.

Remedios came forward and spoke to Pedro. ‘What shall we call it? “La Libertad”?’

“‘Nueva Chiriguana”,’ suggested Misael.

‘No,’ said Aurelio. ‘It is a city of cats beneath a lake. Its name will be “Cochadebajo de los Gatos”.’

He said this with such certainty that the flow of suggestions immediately ceased and the word was passed around as to the name of their new home. People rolled the phrase around their tongues, and found it good.

‘Vamos,’ said Hectoro. ‘We have a lot of digging to do.’

‘I will leave now,’ announced Aurelio, ‘but I will be back. I have important things to do.’

‘Come back laden with shovels,’ said Don Emmanuel, and Aurelio turned his mule around and led it back up the incline to retrace his steps.

He returned to the jungle to be with Carmen whilst he gathered sacks of roots and herbs. Then he went into the mountains to fast for two weeks and summon the power of the spirits. When he felt that the veil between this world and the next was so thin that he could reach through it he returned to the jungle and loaded four mules with the medicines. He took three days to reach the foot of the glacier, and stayed there for one week to do his work with the aid of Federico and Parlanchina.

The people of Cochadebajo de los Gatos found themselves faced with a Herculean labour, and many thought it was too vast even to attempt. Don Emmanuel, however, having walked the length of the valley, found that much of the water was retained by the remnant of the dam. It took a week of strenuous labour to lever and shove the great rocks over the slope and send them spinning and bouncing into the valley below where they crashed to a halt amongst the splintered stumps of what had been a forest before the flood.

As the water seeped away the outer edges of the alluvial mud began to dry out, and Sergio had an inspired idea.

‘Escuchame!’ he exclaimed one evening in the courtyard of the palace where most of the people were encamped. ‘We have very few spades and shovels, maybe two hundred between us, and we have no places to grow food. Let us cut the mud into bricks as it dries, and pass the bricks along the line so that those on the slopes may build andenes! When they are built, then we can fill them in and we will have the richest crops in the world!’

The leaders were very impressed. Hectoro said, ‘It also solves the problem of where to put all the mud. It is a good idea, Sergio.’

‘To avoid argument,’ suggested Remedios, ‘let us agree that no one may occupy a house until enough are cleared for everyone to live.’

‘No one would obey,’ said Josef, ‘even though it is a good idea. It would be better for those who want a particular house to draw lots for it, like in the lottery.’

‘We have no lottery tickets,’ remarked Sergio.

On the next day the new system was inaugurated and no one exempted themselves from the task, not even the voluptuous and sybaritic Felicidad, who rolled up her skirts and passed bricks with the rest of them.

Over the weeks the people grew thin and exhausted, living on what little food was left, what was brought in by the cats, and what was foraged in neighbouring valleys by Misael and his train of mules. On one of these journeys he came across a small Indian settlement and bartered a mule in return for seed potatoes, yukka, maize seed, and three ewes and a ram. From this humble beginning, and further barterings for goats, bananas and llamas, grew the vast agricultural enterprise that would one day become the root of the flourishing mountain economy of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, which was able to trade its surplus with the town of Ipasueno and with villages over all the highlands.