The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (40 page)

The bomb under General Ramirez’ platform at the officers’ passing out parade went off after the ceremony, and killed no one. The assassin’s bullet intended for Admiral Fleta passed harmlessly through his hat, and the grenade in Air Chief Marshal Sanchis’ briefcase failed to detonate. They all became deeply nervous men, but continued to plot together as though they had no suspicions of treachery. The President continued to examine the transcripts of their conversations and wondered if he dared risk the fury of the military by having them arrested for high treason and then shot. He decided to bide his time and see how far he could encourage the three commanders to destroy each other and their respective forces. He summoned each one in turn to the Presidential Palace, and warned them rather vaguely of plots he had had intimations of from the Service of State Information. These plots, he told them, were being hatched by ‘certain members’ of the other two services; naturally the information was highly confidential and should be divulged to no one at all under any circumstances.

The Chiefs of Staff began to put into motion plans for infiltrating each other’s security services. This was almost impossible because you cannot, for example, infiltrate an army man into a naval organisation because membership applications would be carefully scrutinised by the Naval vetting office. Instead, it was found necessary to offer huge bribes to known members of other services, and no one knew anymore who was a single, double or triple agent. The subsequent atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia caused the operations against civilian subversives to cease almost completely because it took up so much time and energy to find, torture, and dispose of the operatives of the secret services of the other arms of the military. One of the ironies of all this was that although all the assassinations, abductions, disappearances, and explosions were automatically blamed by all of them on left-wing terrorism, the left suddenly found that it was no longer being persecuted, and it crept warily back out of the woodwork.

The Communists were once more free to distribute news-sheets condemning each other’s organisations and calling for
unity, and Anarchists once more were free to paint slogans on bridges and police stations; the Trotskyists were once more free to accuse the Communists of Stalinism; the Maoists once more came out to preach perpetual revolution and collect centavos in aid of the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru. All of them talked enthusiastically as if the revolution was already achieved, argued with each other about ideological purity, and secretly missed the days when they had been forced to operate in elaborate secrecy, use passwords and secret drops, and secret meeting places in rat-infested cellars. The relenting pace of persecution made them feel less important, which insulted their pride. The Maoists and the Anarchists therefore began to leave bombs by military targets, not knowing that unofficially they would never receive any credit for it. If they had known this, it is doubtful that they would have bothered to leave any more of them, for nothing irks a revolutionary more than being dismissed as an irrelevance and as not deserving of notoriety.

The campaign between the military gained in momentum and viciousness; regular officers began to disappear from their homes in the boots of Ford Falcons, and their bodies would appear at graveyards and be buried as ‘Non Nombre’. Bodies would be hurled from aeroplanes into the jungle until the Anuesha, Jibaros and Bracamoros Indians began to accept into their mythology the idea that the wings of angels can actually fall off, causing them to crash to the ground. The Navy found a current that did not wash bodies on to the beaches of holiday resorts, and the sharks became used to the sound of the engines of the launches that brought them their dinner, and would be milling around awaiting their arrival. The surface of the sea would briefly turn bright red, and would foam and heave with the furious thrashing of the sharks as they fought for morsels. Those unfortunates still conscious would attempt to swim away and be dragged down suddenly like fishing floats, only to bob to the surface again, to be dragged down once more. The Army attempted a similar method of disposal in a large tank of piranhas, and discovered that they did not quite live up to their voracious reputation, leaving the soldiers the unpleasant task
of having to fish out the partly stripped bodies. That particular experiment was discontinued, and someone had the idea of trying to dump the piranhas in Admiral Fleta’s swimming pool. The latter only had the pool for the purpose of status and no one ever swam in it, so that the first he knew of it was when he was walking around his very large estate and saw the starved fish floating dead on the surface. He took it as a practical joke in poor taste, and never realised that it had been a particularly fatuous attempt on his life; just as hopeless, in fact, as the famous CIA plot to stage a second coming of Christ in Cuba so as to topple the atheist Castro.

Nobody can be quite sure of how many lives were lost in this clandestine internecine struggle, because all records were destroyed before the scandal could be investigated. A scandal was what it became, because the officers were the progeny of those kinds of family that are in a position to make a fuss when their sons disappear. Some of the protesting families began to disappear as well, and the scandal grew rapidly to epic proportions until even the newspapers began to print little snippets about it. The Armed Forces themselves, and the President also, blamed it all on the terrorists, but it was already common knowledge that only the military, the State Telephone Company and the State Oil Company had sufficient Ford Falcons to abduct people on such a scale. When terrorists abducted people, it was usually in battered old cars from the 1950s, which were all they could afford.

The President ordered the Chiefs of Staff to put an end to the terror, without actually stating that he knew they were responsible for it, but was secretly relieved when it abated not a jot. The military grant was partially calculated on a per capita basis, and the reduction in personnel was good for his anti-inflationary policies. He was also pleased at the reduction in potential coup-participators.

The dirty war began to extend down through non-commissioned officers, and then to ordinary regulars, and finally to conscripts. The Ministry of Defence began to receive requests from people wishing to buy themselves out, and the President
heard that they were all being refused. He happened to mention during a TV interview that, according to common law, all military personnel were entitled to appeal directly to the Head of State in matters of military justice, and he signed the subsequent flood of buy-out applications without even reading them.

Those who could not afford to buy themselves out began to desert back to their towns and villages, and much energy was wasted in trying to track them down. The depletion in the Force de Frappe over the period of one year was extremely dramatic, both in terms of equipment and personnel, and the President was highly pleased. The only blot on the horizon was that Sanchis, Ramirez and Fleta were still intact and plotting, as the tapes continued to reveal, and moreover they seemed to be hinting that the terror was to be wound down. He saw that on the transcript Ramirez was recorded to have said, ‘I think it’s high time we crushed this terrorism. Don’t you agree that we should all take definite steps?’ And the other two were recorded as having made ‘affirmatory grunts’. He read that there was still no definite date for the coup, and still no clear leader.

With a light heart the President called in on his wife’s gaudy little chamber. She pouted as he came in and reached out her arms.

‘Daddikins has called to play with his naughty little schoolgirl,’ announced His Excellency.

THERE WAS ONCE
a painter who travelled into the cordillera in order to paint an invisible picture of Christ. When he had finished, the local Indians scrambled up the rocks to examine it and found that it was in fact a picture of Viracocha. A Chinaman passing by went up to see what it was that was causing such excitement, and found to his surprise that on the rock was a picture of the Buddha. The painter stuck to his assertion that it was Christ who was invisibly portrayed, and a loud and rancorous argument developed. In the midst of the altercation one of the Indians noticed that the portrait had erased itself.

The truth is that the mountains are a place where you can find whatever you want just by looking, as long as you remember that they do not suffer fools gladly, and particularly dislike those with preconceived ideas.

‘I always meant to ask you,’ said Pedro, ‘why you did not stay in the mountains where you know how to live, but moved to the jungle where you had to learn everything from the beginning.’

‘It was because,’ replied Aurelio, ‘living in mountains which were not my home would have made me homesick. In the jungle I am more free of memories.’

‘Even so,’ said Pedro, ‘would you guide us, and teach us how to live before you return home?’

‘I have to do as you ask; I had already decided it, or you all would be dead in a few days. But I must tell Carmen. There is a tunday up here, and I will send her a message.’

The convoy of men and animals was climbing up the end of the escarpment whence they had witnessed the flood, and were ascending towards a short plateau, a puna, which divided at the end into two valleys. Aurelio went ahead and found the huge hollow log set on cairns, with holes bored in it by fire. He took the club that was left inside it and began to beat the log so that it resounded and boomed. At one end he could make high notes and in the middle, deep ones. By varying the rhythm and pitch he was able to add emphasis and connotation to the simple code and tell Carmen that he would be gone a long time, doing something very important. He waited until he saw the smoke from the damp leaves that Carmen burned to tell him that she had heard, and then he put the club back into the body of the tunday, and rejoined the multitude.

‘Have you noticed,’ said Gloria, ‘that these cats keep getting bigger?’

‘I cannot pick them up any more,’ replied Constanza, ‘but they still play like kittens.’

Father Garcia, who was walking with them, made no observations on the subject because he was just beginning to elaborate in his head a new theology that was becoming more and more interesting and convincing with every metre of altitude, and also more heretical.

The guerrilleros were walking with the ease and economy of practice, but the villagers were already breathless, and aching in the calves and thighs. The animals were merely plodding in a herbivorous dream, snatching mouthfuls of vegetation as they passed it, and looking as though they had grown mobile lopsided whiskers of grass and flowers.

Having arrived at the lower slopes of the mountains, it was realised that no one had a very clear idea of where they were going or what they were going to do when they got there. Under the circumstances one choice seemed as good as another, and so when Sergio told Pedro and Hectoro that in a dream Federico
had told him that they should find the source of the flood, they shrugged their shoulders and agreed, except that Aurelio said there would be no food along the flood valleys because it would all have been swept away.

‘We will walk every day,’ said Sergio, ‘and with luck Federico will tell me every night where we are to go on the next day.’

‘With respect,’ said Aurelio, ‘Federico is not an Indian. In the mountains, Indians travel only in straight lines, no matter what is in the way. In this manner we never get lost. Tell Federico to take us in straight lines, and to admit when he is lost.’

‘He is a spirit,’ rejoined Sergio indignantly. ‘Spirits do not get lost.’

‘You do not know spirits, then,’ said Aurelio. ‘They know little more than they did in life, and have the same faults, including the ability to get lost.’

Once on the puna the people stopped to gather alfalfa and ichu for the animals, and loaded it in bundles on the backs of the already burdened beasts, because there is one golden rule of the mountains: ‘From your house to that of another, always go with your belly full!’ The Indians themselves could ignore this rule because they could keep going for days on coca, which miraculously reduces hunger and thirst and gives energy, but which frequently kills them at an early age as their bodies consume themselves.

Whilst the others gathered fodder, Pedro and Misael went off together up the slopes to stalk a small flock of vicuna that was browsing above. Circling, the two men climbed above the animals, and then crept down out of sight and downwind. At close range they managed to shoot four of them as they ran, and the flock took off at high speed across the rocks. As the men descended to call for helpers to bring the bodies down, Misael said, ‘How are we to feed two thousand on four vicunas?’

‘We cannot,’ replied Pedro. ‘But we have plenty of food in the packs. Those who cannot hunt can live on plants for the time being.’

Down on the puna the animals were skinned and
dismembered, and Pedro and Misael gave away what they could not carry themselves. Aurelio took the skins because he knew how to make the warmest garments and boas out of them, which would be needed before long if they were to take a portachuelo above the snowline.

At the end of the plateau the travellers took the right hand quebrada, and had to scramble over the alluvial lloclia that always seems to accumulate at the bottom entrance of any valley or ravine, and which consists of scattered piles of rocks and animal bones.

All about them they saw the remains of the past life that had once made these mountains a veritable ants’ nest of activity. On the slopes were the andenes, the terraces built up on walls of stones that once fed the old civilisation. On the valley floor were the fallen remnants of small houses built of tapiales, a mud version of Don Emmanuel’s bricks, made in a lattice of planks. The people could see by the outlines of walls that these were places where farmers once lived on their chacaras, and herded llamas and alpacas for wool and meat, and where now there were only one or two tambos, travellers’ huts roughly constructed of bundles of maguey-fibre bound together.