The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (44 page)

Far below in the valley the thunderstruck exiles watched the mighty white torrent descend, bowling giant boulders down the glacier, and making the earth tremble beneath them. They fell to their knees and crossed themselves, invoking spirits and angels, all of them believing that Aurelio and Don Emmanuel were surely dead and buried deep in the mighty cascade.

As the avalanche finished and the snow mist began to settle, some intrepid souls climbed cautiously to the edge of the glacier to see if they could spot the two men, and saw four hundred and fifty. Frozen solid and as fresh as the day that they had iced to death, lay Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, fifty Spanish soldiers in full armour, and four hundred and fifty-one Indian slaves who had met their deaths on an expedition despatched by the conscientious Pizarro to locate the legendary Inca city of Vilcabamba. Released at last by the mountain that had claimed them, they, their mules, and their baggage were washed up by the waves of the rolling sea that had drowned them in the year 1533, on St Cecilia’s Day.

The stunned witnesses to this phenomenon of natural refrigeration were awakened from their wonder by the whoops of Don Emmanuel as he and Aurelio scudded down the slope seated in tandem on the former’s leather garra. They dug in their heels to bring their makeshift toboggan to a halt, and wandered among the ancient bodies in silent amazement. Before the body of the Count, in his rich armour, Aurelio said, ‘He looks exactly like Hectoro.’

Aurelio requested that the bodies be left where they lay and covered over with snow in order to preserve them in their frozen state. ‘I have plans,’ he said, and the people did as he asked, marking each grave in the ice with long sticks cut in the valley. Then Aurelio spoke to Sergio, ‘There is nothing up there but the sky and a long fall. I was right that spirits may get lost.’

Sergio denied strenuously that his son had been lost, saying ‘He wanted to show us these dead men.’

‘We will go where I say,’ said Aurelio, ‘if my son-in-law cannot find the way.’

Aurelio, feeling proud to have been vindicated, led the caravan along the central valley that ran level until, after a long trudge, they came to the edge of the very same precipice, except lower down. Looking down over the edge they saw a sea of cloud below, rolling and breaking on rocky promontories like a great ocean in slow motion, sharply outlined, billowing and eddying. It was a great wonder, but Sergio came and stood next to Aurelio. ‘So,’ he said, with a wounded air of superiority, ‘what of the judgement of the living?’

Beneath them the sea of cloud rose swirling upward, and the people followed the curve of the chasm to the left so that the sun fell upon their backs. When the cloud rose level there was a new wonder, for each person came face-to-face with their own shadowy spirit in the mist. Each spirit had about its head a nimbus of glorious lights and rainbow colours, and when the people fell to their knees in awe and terror, crossing themselves, their spirits too fell to the earth and crossed themselves. When they sprang to their feet, so did their spirits, and aped their every movement, until at last, their terror diminishing, the people played with their spirits, and tried to see if they could catch them out with a sharp movement. Then the cloud billowed and spilled over the edge, engulfing them, and their shadow spirits with their glorious haloes disappeared.

The multitude turned their animals about, and they remade their steps back to the foot of the glacier, followed by the cloud, and there they took the last alternative.

The slope curved gently but rapidly down, way below the
towering wall of the precipice whose vertical seams they could see were stained red with iron. A wide river with foaming rapids and sparkling falls flowed down next to their descent, thundering from between the twin breasts of a valley up and behind them to the south.

The people could feel the air grow warmer and thicker as they came down, performing a descent in a few hours whose ascent had taken days. The slope curled round the base of the mountain whose peak was at the northern edge of the ridge upon which Aurelio and Don Emmanuel had stood, and which was now concealed by the very cloud that had revealed to them their spirits, beautiful in grace and in glory.

Down they went, and round the slope curled, until they beheld below them the greatest wonder of all, and stood in dumbstruck astonishment at what they saw.

HIS EXCELLENCY THE
President surveyed with satisfaction the results of his policy of divide and rule; the armed forces were in a chaos of confusion and fear, and the Chiefs of Staff had still not managed to reach any decisions about the indefinitely postponed coup. In addition an appetising scandal was beginning to grow up around the unsavoury person of General Ramirez. The President did not know how this had happened, but it appeared from stories published in the foreign press that the General had been involved in nefarious activities in which many people had disappeared, and it seemed highly likely that Ramirez, the most powerful and dangerous of the Chiefs of Staff, would soon be obliged to tender his resignation.

Whilst General Ramirez chewed his nails and became more and more uncomfortable, His Excellency, by contrast, spent less and less time fretting over the dangers and difficulties of office, and consequently found that time was lying heavily on his hands. He became preoccupied with the continuing economic crisis of the country and of the capital, which is to say, the legacy of Raoul Buenanoce and Dr Jorge Badajoz.

In particular he was concerned by the $60,000,000 foreign debt, because the country could barely survive the interest on it, let alone begin to pay it off. Consequently, it was becoming almost impossible to secure foreign credit, and the International
Monetary Fund would not help at all because it already had problems with Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, as did the World Bank and all the major lending institutions, particularly Lloyds. He tried hard to get the debt payments rescheduled, but realised that there had to be found a more dramatic answer to the problem.

He thought of attempting to sabotage the coffee-production of all the other coffee-producing countries in the world in order to raise prices in time for the next harvest, but was told that any disease introduced in, for example, Colombia or Brazil would soon find its way home again, and that Kenya was too far away to sabotage easily. He realised that he could do nothing to raise tin prices, for people would merely use plastic instead, and with OPEC in perpetual disarray he could not raise oil prices either.

He searched in vain for alternatives until his ideas soon lost touch with the realms of possibility. He sent off state-sponsored missions to find El Dorado, even though the legends placed it in Peru, Guyana, Ecuador or Colombia, or possibly even in Bolivia. He sent for Indian leaders to question them closely as to where the Inca gold had come from, only to receive unhelpful answers, such as, ‘It came from here, and went to Spain.’ He instructed his Ambassador in London to demand back the contents of the treasure galleons taken by Sir Francis Drake, and even thought of declaring war on Chile so that he could take the nitrate fields that the Chileans had stolen from the Peruvians. Over and over in his mind he revolved the famous adage that ‘This country is a beggar in rags sitting on a pile of gold’, and asked himself, ‘Where is the pile of gold?’ His enquiries revealed that all the concessions on gold, silver, lead, mercury, copper, sulphates, iron, tin, emeralds and mercury were in the hands of the foreign corporations who had had the capital to invest in them, so it occurred to him that these industries should all be nationalised. Then he remembered what had happened to Salvador Allende, and how the USA had reacted when Castro threw out the American tycoons, and realised that that would be the same thing as inviting the CIA to depose him.

Then he remembered having read an article about alchemy, in which it had been stated that certain sages had found the secret of transforming base metals into gold, and that it had once been done in public by the Imperator of the Rosicrucian Order. He ordered the State Archivist to go to the University library and photocopy every book they had on the subject of alchemy, and he ordered from the United States a complete laboratory to be fitted out in the disused wing of the Presidential Palace.

The President found his new reading matter turgid, incomprehensible, and contradictory. Most of it was in Latin or Greek, and he had to hire a scholar to translate it. What there was of it in Spanish spoke of antimony, philosophic mercury, the white lion, water, auripigment, Citrine Seyre, Meridian Redness, Argent vive, dissolution, coagulation, precipitation, White of Black, Red of White, Citrine of Red, moist fire, the Crow, the Vulture, the Red Lion, the flying volatile, colcothar, the Hen’s Egg, the fugitive Ens, albuminous bodies, Slat, faeces, the Dragon, the Perscrutinator of the Waters, the Stone of the Philosophers, Magnesia, foliated sulphur, virgin’s milk, the Rational Efficient, Botri, verdigris, tragacanth, Ixir, the Psychical Quintessence and the Intellectual Essence.

His brain whirling and reeling with confusion and incomprehension, he puzzled his way through the works of Basil Valentine, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Vaughan, Ficino, Roger Bacon, Geber, Kirchringius, Heliodorus, Synesius, Athenagoras, Zozimus, Archelaus, Olympiodorus, Sendivogius, Eirenaeus, Albertus Magnus, Hermes Trismegistus, and most of the other household names of the Hermetic Art.

Having filled his laboratory with retorts, test-tubes, ovens, gas-evacuation cupboards, retort-stands, burners, crucibles, and row upon row of brightly-coloured chemicals in jars, he set to work to create gold from lead. Rather than confuse himself with trying to make sense of collating dozens of unintelligible alchemical tracts complete with mystical diagrams, he decided to work through each tract individually, starting with the Golden Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.

He was already lost by the fifth paragraph: ‘Take of the Humidity an ounce and a half, and of The Meridian Redness that is the Soul of Gold a fourth part, that is to say, half an ounce; of the Auripigment, half-which are eight – that is three ounces; and know ye that the vine of the wise is drawn forth in three, and the wine thereof is perfected in thirty.’

It was quite hopeless; it was impossible to know what any of these sages, adepts and magi actually meant, all of them being equally obscure.

So the President became what was known in Renaissance times as a ‘Puffer’ – an arbitrary and unguided experimenter. After one or two nasty burns, after having choked on chlorine and been repelled by hydrogen sulphide, after having had the toe-cap of one shoe dissolved by a splash of nitric acid and having lost his hair, the President had made for himself a rubber suit with a built-in gas-mask and a torch for finding his way about in the clouds of smoke and noxious vapours.

In six months of assiduous experiment His Excellency had not transmuted lead into gold. He had caused four serious fires, three explosions, and countless emissions of toxic gases that would leave the laboratory noisome for days, even for one wearing a gas-mask.

He succeeded, nevertheless, in inventing by mistake an explosive that could demolish anything within two metres of its blast, but whose force was abruptly and inexplicably arrested at precisely that distance. He repeated this experiment numerous times with a great deal of paternal pride, and wrote down the recipe with the intention of patenting it in the United States.

His attention was diverted, however, by a conversation he had with the Foreign Secretary, who was well versed in the occult and was, as mentioned before, personally acquainted with the Archangel Gabriel. He informed the President that all alchemical writings were elaborate metaphors describing sexual techniques designed to bring about one’s wishes and unify the soul with God, simultaneously.

The President hurried back to his books, and starting with
Basil Valentine’s
Chariot of Antinomy
began to translate them into coital guides for magicians, with success far exceeding anything he had achieved when treating them as textbooks for esoteric chemistry. Fired with intellectual excitement the President laboured through the nights, further damaging his health (already impaired by his misguided experiments), and believing that here at last was a wonderful way of achieving one’s desires at the same time as enjoying the most delicious and tantalising concupiscence.

He compiled an alchemical glossary, of which here are given a few terms:

Having translated all these terms, and the dozens remaining, His Excellency decided to enlist the co-operation of his wife in seeing how well the instructions could be followed as a sexual metaphor, and what results would ensue. She, having worked as an ‘actress’ in a strip-club, was perfectly happy to put her Panamanian skills to such novel use, and they proceeded as follows.

During the days they practised magical chastity; that is to say they tried not to permit themselves any thoughts of an erotic nature. Any mental images of copulation or nakedness they banished sternly from their minds in order to concentrate upon mundane and strictly untitillating matters. They both
discovered that this was no easy matter, and confirmed the popular myth that most people think about the erotic most of the time, even if they are the President. The object of this difficult and inhuman exercise was to conserve all their sexual energy for the evenings.

In the evening they took a bath together and washed each other with great scrupulousness and application, but not without some hilarity. Then they dried off and retired to the presidential bedchamber, where they performed a little ritual of the President’s invention, wherein the President would place his hands on his wife’s shoulders, look into her eyes and intone, ‘You are my Queen, you are the living Isis, you are my Priestess.’ Whereupon she would put her hands on his shoulders, look into his eyes, and recite, ‘You are my King, you are the Risen Osiris, you are my Priest.’