The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (15 page)

Carmen, Aurelio’s wife, was a small Negress with tight curls of ginger hair which indicated a little miscegenation somewhere in her ancestry. She had a raucous laugh and easy manner, and smoked huge puro cigars whose soggy tips she clenched between her teeth. She was a happy woman, living in the clearing in the jungle with Aurelio and his dogs, gathering castana nuts from beneath the huge trees, tapping a little latex from the rubber trees, and growing a little maize in the impoverished earth. She had, despite enthusiastic efforts, managed to conceive no children by Aurelio, and they had taken in a little urchin girl that Aurelio had found huddled in a doorway on one of his dog-buying excursions to Valladolid.

At first the little girl had spoken not at all, and the couple had wondered if she was dumb. ‘Everything is the wrong way round,’ said Aurelio. ‘All my dogs give voice, and my child is silent.’ But it turned out that the trouble was that the child, who was about four years old, had simply never learned to talk for lack of opportunity and occasion. By the time that she was a vivacious and funny girl of twelve with budding breasts and coquettish eyes, she spoke in positive torrents, and the couple nicknamed her ‘Parlanchina’, a name that translates roughly as ‘Babbler’.

But it had not been easy to bring Parlanchina out of her animal state. She had communicated at first in hoarse grunts of a very hostile nature, and she had frequently bitten Aurelio on the hand when he had tried to come near her. Worse than this, she had preferred generally to go on all fours and associate rather with the dogs than with the loving couple. She refused to wash or let her clothes be changed, and she stank horribly. Aurelio knew that it was time for drastic action when she
actually bit one of the dogs on the ear when competing for kitchen leavings, and on the same day he discovered that in her excrement was a writhing mass of parasites. ‘It is time,’ he said to his wife, ‘to be a little cruel in order to make her human.’

Carmen agreed. She went out into the jungle and gathered bitter barks and herbs. These she steeped in aguardiente in order to make a tincture, and the couple managed to force this down the child’s throat after a long and bitter struggle which left Parlanchina bruised and more hostile than ever, and the couple extensively scratched and bitten. Carmen was satisfied, however, upon inspecting the child’s next dollop of faeces, that the parasites were expelled and dead.

Then the couple decided to educate the child with a system of rewards and punishments. The punishment side of the project was easy because animals have in common with humans a general dislike of pain. The rewards were more difficult to find because Parlanchina had the same tastes as the dogs, and Carmen and Aurelio did not think it right to reward her with bones and kitchen slops, as these were precisely what they wished to wean her away from. Eventually they found to their delight that Parlanchina was crazy about nuts and guavas, and some part of the day was always therefore devoted to gathering them.

At first Aurelio had thought that there was no point in trying to speak with Parlanchina, ‘Because she does not understand and does not answer,’ and so he tried to communicate with her in grunts and gestures.

‘I think,’ said Carmen one day, ‘that we should give up all this grunting business. I find it tiresome and tiring. Perhaps we should continue to point and wave our arms about, but I think that if we do not speak to her she will not learn to speak. I think we should speak all the time without stopping.’

So Carmen and Aurelio spoke without stopping. They pointed to things and named them – eventually Parlanchina learned to follow the line of their pointing instead of staring at the tip of their pointed finger with a puzzled expression. Then she learned to point as well. Carmen and Aurelio spoke all the
time. They spoke about everything, they spoke about nothing, and they spoke about how fed up they were with speaking.

One day Parlanchina pointed to a guava on the table and smiled her very first smile. ‘Gwubba,’ she said, distinctly and with precision. The couple threw themselves upon her with delight, and from that point there was no looking back.

For a week the little girl tried out ‘gwubba’ in different intonations and emphases until she became bored of it. Then she began to acquire vocabulary at a steady and breathtaking pace. Soon she found ways of making elementary sentences that missed out inessential words, and began to refer to herself: ‘Me want dog’, ‘Me go pee-pee’.

Exhilarated, Carmen and Aurelio continued to speak all the time, and Parlanchina began to speak to herself as she did things. ‘She’s thinking out loud,’ reported Carmen. ‘It proves she can think,’ replied Aurelio. Then she started to speak overgrammatically, making no allowances for the idiosyncrasies and oddities of language. ‘I wented and seed the sheeps,’ she would say, and Aurelio would say, ‘Did you? I went and saw the sheep too,’ correcting her by example. Carmen and Aurelio carried on speaking all the time, and by the time she was seven Parlanchina believed this was normal and began to turn into the inveterate chatterbox that she remained until the day of her death.

In other respects too, she learned well. She learned to eat with a knife, and delicately with her fingers, licking them without slurping, as civilised people do, and she stopped putting her food on the floor and diving into it head first. She stopped growling as she ate, she learned to eat slowly rather than bolt the food voraciously, and she learned to belch roundly, like a respectable Indian.

Parlanchina was taught by Carmen to excrete in the jungle, away from the house, and she was taught to wash and perform all the necessary tasks of life. Additionally she became playful and affectionate, and would sit on Aurelio’s knee trying to tease his real name out of him. She would kiss him on the cheek, whisper nonsensical little nothings in his ear, and say, ‘Papacito, come on, tell me your real name.’

‘Donkey face,’ said Aurelio.

‘Oh Papacito, what is it? You can tell me,’ and she would laugh prettily, and wheedle a little more.

‘It’s “Melon-bum”.’

‘Oh no, Papacito, it isn’t. Tell me. I will cry.’

‘No you will not, and I will not tell you either. If I tell anyone they will have power over me, and you have enough power over me already.’

‘O Papa, am I good? Do not I do as you say?’

‘Not always,’ replied Aurelio.

‘Ooh, you big liar. Anyway, why do you have a real name?’

‘I have told you hundreds of times, little one.’

‘I know, but I like to hear it. It is so scary. Tell me again.’

‘Well,’ said Aurelio, putting on his storytelling voice, ‘at the entrance to the afterworld there is a monster, a big ugly fierce monster with teeth like machetes. If you cannot tell him your real name he will not let you into the afterworld. Instead . . .’ and Aurelio made gnashing and swallowing noises, and patted his stomach ‘. . . the monster eats you up and your spirit remains forever in his stomach where it is dark and stinking, and your spirit howls forever with horror and despair.’

Parlanchina shuddered and shook her long black hair. ‘Papacito, when will you tell me my real name?’

‘I will tell you when you grow to womanhood, little one. The monster lets all children pass. I will tell you when your little breasts swell and the blood flows from you according to the cycle of the moon.’

‘When will that be, Papacito? When?’

‘Soon enough, little one.’

Parlanchina never grew completely out of her wildness. She took to the jungle as naturally as a tigre, and as fearlessly. From her parents she learned to name all animals, all fish, and all plants, and she learned all their properties and uses for food and medicine.

On her own initiative she learned to track the animals, discovered their habits, and found how it was to be that animal. She learned to imitate their voices and dupe them into panic, or
into approaching her. She made a pet of an ocelot kitten that grew big and handsome and would terrify the dogs, even though he was smaller than they were. The cat stepped prettily after his pretty mistress, and slept on top of her in her hammock, sticking his claws in her every time she moved. ‘He believes that one’s mattress should stay still,’ she said.

Parlanchina grew taller than her parents. At the age of twelve her long smooth legs seemed so long that they appeared to reach her armpits. Her black, straight hair she parted in the middle and wore down to her waist, so that it flowed about her as she moved with grace, silence and precision through the jungle about her home. She found a way of tossing her hair back with a flick of the head, and then looking at you sideways with her huge brown eyes. Gently she would smile, as if she knew a wicked secret, and when she smiled the tip of her nose would move just a little downward. Her voluptuous skin was somewhere between olive and black, and it had already some of the softness and glow of a teenager. Like a teenager too, she would have periods of dreaming, her chin on her hand as she gazed into the distance, as though she was gazing into the future.

‘That girl is so lovely that I am afraid for her,’ confided Aurelio one day to his wife. ‘She reminds me of a faun.’

‘Why are you afraid?’ asked Carmen, surprised.

‘I am afraid that one of the gods will fall in love with her and take her away from us. I have a terrible fear.’

‘I think it is more likely,’ rejoined Carmen, ‘that a young man will take her away, and that is how it should be.’

Aurelio ran his fingers through his wife’s copper curls. ‘Do you think she could make a man happy? Wild and beautiful as she is?’

‘I think,’ said Carmen, after a little thought, ‘that she would make a man so happy that if he did not die of it, he would certainly go mad.’

‘A son-in-law and some little ones would make me very happy,’ said Aurelio sadly. ‘I shall make an offering to Santa Barbara and also to the gods that it may come to pass.’

‘Aurelio,’ said Carmen, kissing him on the cheek and
embracing him maternally. ‘Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That is why fear should be unknown to us.’

In fact Parlanchina discovered men before they ever discovered her. Remedios’ group passed along a jungle path five kilometres away quite regularly en route for the foothills to the Sierra, and army patrols also occasionally passed by. Parlanchina was fascinated, and she tracked them as silently and efficiently as she would track any other animal. She observed their demeanour; how the guerrilleros were always laughing and joking and making a lot of noise, and how the soldiers always crept along, sweating and suffering beneath the weight of their clinging uniforms and bulging back-packs. She saw how their eyes bulged with nervousness and how their mouths gaped with fear like beached fish. She saw how they started every time their feet cracked a twig, and she began to play games with them. From the cover of the trees, with her ocelot crouched beside her, she would suddenly let out a coughing growl like a tigre, screech like a parrot, or whoop like a howler monkey. Giggling with delight, she would relate to both her parents how the soldiers had leapt with fright, had fallen flat on their stomachs, and fired shots wildly into the vegetation. They would shake their heads and admonish her, but she would not stop, because she was always hoping to see Federico. Federico was the secret cause of her daytime reveries, and she followed him whenever he passed, to gaze on his fine slim body and his handsome face. She found herself imagining what it would be like to stroke his flat belly and his long legs, and when she saw him her heart would leap in her breast, and something would catch at the back of her throat. When she did not see Federico, tormenting the soldiers was a little consolation: But no one ever saw her; the soldiers never knew that they owed some of their torture to her, and Federico never knew that the most lovely and most voluble girl in Cesar was in love with him.

One day Parlanchina came home and said to her father with surprise and amusement, ‘Papacito, the soldiers are hiding dishes on the path. Why do you think they are doing that?’

Aurelio took his knife out of the ground, thinking wearily that he would have to put up with his toothache. He would have to go and see what she was talking about, and he would not go anywhere without his knife, even if it was bad luck to break a spell. He and Parlanchina walked through the trees and then crept to within a few metres of the soldiers and observed them. They were indeed hiding dishes, dishes that looked like two plates stuck together, and which they were handling so carefully that at first Aurelio thought that they must be sacred objects. But then something clicked in his memory, something his father had told him, back in Bolivia, when he was a child and long before he had come all this way by river and on foot. He remembered that when the whites had wanted to drive the Indians off their land they had hidden things on the paths that made a terrible noise and threw people’s limbs into the trees. He waited until the soldiers slunk away and said to Parlanchina, ‘Little one, those things are called “Sudden-death-by-thunder”. If you tread on one it tears your body with metal and flame. It seems they want to drive us away, as my people were driven away. We must destroy those things, but we cannot touch them.’

‘How will we destroy them, Papacito?’

‘I am going back to get my rifle. I will destroy metal with metal and fire with fire, from the safety of the trees. Little one, you must stay here and you must stop any man and any animal from going on the path, and you must not go on the path or you will die a terrible death. When I return I will discover the dishes and I will shoot them from far away. Do you understand, little one?’

‘Of course I do, Papacito. Return quickly.’

Aurelio slipped away, and Parlanchina settled her long limbs down by a tree to watch the path. Nothing stirred. Aurelio seemed to be taking a long time. It was very boring. She began to doze in the dappled sunlight. She was dreaming about Federico. How fine he was!

Then she woke with a start. Something was wrong. Then she realised what it was. Her little ocelot had grown bored as well,
and had stolen away. She saw his spotted tail waving in the undergrowth as he strolled towards the path. She sprang up, horrified. ‘Gato!’ she called. ‘Gato! Come here, venga! Venga!’ The cat turned his head mischievously and broke into a trot. He often played this game. It was very amusing. ‘Gato!’ shrieked Parlanchina. Three hundred metres away Aurelio heard her and broke into a desperate run, snagging himself on thorns and cursing as he went crashing through the undergrowth.