The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (9 page)

Aurelio decided to make himself a raft to see him safely down the waters. The jungle hung so thickly now that in places there was a deep gloom; where the sun broke through the foliage the light was so incandescent that it hurt to pass through it, and one could come up in blisters even beneath one’s clothes.

It was in cutting himself a raft and binding it with lianas that Aurelio took his first real step in the long process of metamorphosis from sierra Indian to jungle Indian. He discovered that some woods are too hard to cut and others too heavy to float, and he discovered that some creepers are good for binding and others merely break as soon as they are twisted. In drifting with the current he found that he needed a pole to prevent the craft from becoming stuck in the many fallen trees that lay across the water, to push himself away from the bank or from shoals which grounded him, and to push away the hanging creepers as he passed through them. He found too that the raft tended to revolve on the water as it drifted, so he cut himself a paddle to make it more controllable.

Aurelio was unnaturally lucky. The rapids he had to negotiate were mild, there were none of the usual whirlpools such as once sunk the steamer
Ucayali
on the Amazon when the Captain was drunk, and there were no falls which he did not see in advance and circumvent with a portage. He bathed in waters
full of piranha fish, which were not hungry because the dry season had not yet caused overcrowding, and when he urinated while swimming no barbed sheatfish entered his urethra, so he did not suffer the fate of many a European explorer who has had to have his penis cut open to remove the fish. He was fortunate too that there were no rains to turn the rivers suddenly into cataracts and the jungle into a chain of giant lakes, and that no chushupi, ratsnake or pitviper dropped from among the overhanging drapes of orchids, and that the anaconda that watched him pass had already swallowed a peccary.

In other ways Aurelio was not lucky. He was emaciated with hunger and recurring fevers, his body was covered with sores caused by jiggers, his flesh was crawling with the writhing grubs of the warble fly, and he was suffering from jungle-madness. A relentless loneliness and self-doubt had overwhelmed him. There was nothing there at all for him to love or to like. He was stifled by the humidity which made him perspire so copiously that a wave of his arm would send an arc of sweaty droplets flying. He was stifled by the arcane forms of life, the blinding colours that possessed the surreality of nightmares, the hideous lust for death, the brutality and loathing of all the grotesque creatures that ravenously consumed each other without thought or pity. He was oppressed and horrified by the merciless buzzing of mosquitoes, the calls of the trumpeter birds, the shrieks of the black-faced howler monkeys with their hideous goitred necks, the sound of trains mysteriously created by ducks in flight, the prehistoric grunts of caimans, the strange greetings of tapirs, sounding exactly like ‘Hi!’, the irritating cracking of fingers made by the ageronia butterflies, the ringing of bells made by some mysterious fish beneath his raft, the outraged idiotic squawks of hundreds of different kinds of parrots, the coughs of the forest fox, the chatting of the anis birds, the demonic laughter of otters, the unearthly beautiful song of the white-eared puff-birds, the unnerving nocturnal hilarity of the laughing hawk, the ‘Koro! Koro!’ of the cayenne ibis, the piping of guans, the jaguar calls of the
tiger heron, the rattles of the cocoi heron, and, worst of all, the demented scrapings of armies of gigantic crickets.

Aurelio, overwhelmed by the horrifying plenitude of nature at her most sybaritic and dionysiac, was troubled by tormenting dreams in his hammock at night. By day he gibbered to himself, and gesticulated as though addressing an audience. He started at every noise, like a nervous dog, and scratched furiously at his bites until they ulcerated and suppurated. He forgot to steer his raft and drifted, revolving on the current, his sanity and Inca stoicism inexorably draining away as his imagination filled with apparitions, monsters, and nostalgia for the cold clean Sierra.

He was awoken out of his verdantly foliated stupor by the sight one day of a man struggling with a huge sucuri snake with coils as thick as a man’s thigh. The water snake had come up behind the fishing Indian, sunk its fangs into his shoulder, and wrapped him in coil after coil in order to crush his ribs, and to drown him.

Aurelio had never seen such a snake in his life and at first he thought it was a part of his tropical dream. He stood up on his raft and poled it to the scene of the unequal struggle. The Indian, a pocket Hercules of a man, was trying to slash at the snake with a bamboo knife, but was on the point of losing consciousness. Aurelio leapt from his raft, which drifted away downstream, and threw himself on the serpent. He cut gaping gashes in it with his machete, and was thrown down more than once by its lashing tail. Suddenly the animal released the Indian from its jaws and made to clamp Aurelio by the neck. The latter slashed its head and the creature immediately went into violent death throes that were as lethal as its tactics in life. Aurelio strove to unwind its quivering and contracting body, and when the thrashing reptile had floated away to feed the fishes, he and the victim of the attack struggled to the bank and collapsed side by side.

Aurelio spent the first day of his ten years with the Navantes unconscious. The reasons he was not killed immediately by them were that he had saved the life of the sub-chief, Dianari,
and that the people were curious to know who this ulcered apparition with the plait in his hair actually was.

The paje of the clan took ayahuasca and yague to learn from the spirits whether or not they would give up Aurelio’s soul, and he bartered and parleyed with them for a long time before they consented. Then he blew smoke over Aurelio’s body, scoured the parasites out of it with the teeth of the traira fish, and rubbed it all over with healing mud and bark, and copaiba oil.

The paje was normally the most feared and therefore the most shortlived of all members of a clan, but this one was moved uncommonly by the spirit of compassion, and had once lain motionless for two weeks whilst a nest of mice hatched in his hair. When Aurelio recovered he was eventually to become a pupil to the paje.

Back in the Sierra, Don Hernandez Almagro Mendez lost half his fortune in mines that were long ago exhausted, and an anomalous frost ruined his coffee plantation.

LIFE IS NOTHING
if not a random motion of coincidences and quirks of chance; it never goes as planned or as foretold; frequently one gains happiness from being obliged to follow an unchosen path, or misery from following a chosen one. How often can one refrain from wondering what portentous events may not have arisen from some trivial circumstance which thereby has acquired a significance far beyond itself?

It was coincidence that a young man of fifteen, burned dark by the sun and his eyes flashing with a zeal born of hatred was standing watch on the easternmost crag of the mountain when an athletic and middle-aged man of distinguished bearing, dressed like a peasant, passed below with a donkey. He carried a pair of binoculars, a camera, and a service revolver which was stuck in his belt. It was this weapon which attracted Federico’s interest, because guerrillas are always short of weapons, and have a habit of collecting them as others collect stamps or seashells.

Federico was much changed in the year of his absence. It was not just that he was taller, more arrogant and more articulate; it was that he had come through immense difficulty and hardship and become at last a man in his own eyes.

It had been terrible in the beginning after he had run away from the corpse, shaking with fear, horror and nausea, and yet
too proud to go home, and also too ashamed. The worst thing was that he had not known what to eat, how to obtain it, or how to cook it when he had no matches, no pans, and had always eaten what his mother produced by apparent miracle, without thought as to how she had turned raw matter into good food. He had remembered that you could eat maize, and for a day or two he stole it from the fields of the minifundistas which were scattered amongst the foothills, and ate it raw. Then he remembered that you could eat the roots of the yucca, which grew wild everywhere; but these were not good raw, so instead he ate mangoes, avocadoes, and guavas, which filled his belly but did not satisfy his hunger for meat.

It had not been very difficult to steal and kill a chicken, and it was not hard to pluck it, but he had no knife to disembowel it, so he walked for hours with it amongst the rocks until he found a piece of quartz sharp enough to pierce the yielding flesh of the belly. But he could not make a fire. He struck rocks together over dead leaves and dry grass; once or twice there were sparks, but there was never a fire. He rubbed wood together as Pedro did, but did not know the right woods to use. That night he slept with the chicken beside him in his mochila, and in the morning the mochila was several metres away and the chicken gone. He wept with frustration and fury, cursing the wild beast which was so immoral as to steal his stolen chicken. Painstakingly, he dammed off a little patch of a stream and hit a fat comelon on the head with a stick; it is a fish more delicate and succulent than trout, but not without fire. He abandoned it to the enciso ants when it began to stink. He lived off fruit until he stole a box of wax matches and a machete from the barraca of some unfortunate mountain peasant, and discovered that the only way to cope without utensils was to roast on a spit or to bake in the cinders. He grew to understand later why the most prized possessions of the guerrillero, besides a weapon, are a magnifying glass for focusing the rays of the sun, and a cooking pot.

The second to worst thing was solitude, for he was not of an age when it is eagerly sought and welcomed. It is true that there were times when he felt an extraordinary euphoria, when
he was overwhelmed by the joyfulness of liberty as he cavorted in rock pools, being tweaked at by those strange little fish that love to eat the scabs off mosquito bites. He often felt entirely at one with himself and the world, living wild almost without purpose in an Eden of clear water, darting humming-birds, luminous vegetation and a sky of startling angularity. But he knew he was already half-crazy for want of friendship when a sob came to his throat one day at the sight of a large, friendly-faced cavy and his heart had reached out to the creature. He became possessed of a tyrannical grief.

Tears are wept best in company, and so he bled them inwardly, missing with all his soul the life and the people he had left, and so it was that his already wild existence gradually became increasingly disordered. He stopped bothering to wash properly every day, fed himself only by starts, and talked loudly to himself whenever he did anything that required concentration, as though he could not have performed it without an explanation. The trouble was that he had been avoiding other people needlessly, thinking that they would be suspicious of him, as though his crime and his plans were written across his face, and as though anyone would really have cared if they had been.

This phase of his existence came to an abrupt end when he rounded a curve of the path and came face to face with an old man pulling a donkey laden with bananas. It was too late to duck into the undergrowth.

‘Buena’ dia’!’ exclaimed the old man, grinning through his lack of teeth. ‘A fine day for hunting!’ He was nodding his head vigorously towards the Lee Enfield, and his voice had in it a warm and friendly crackle, like dried leaves.

Without taking time for thought Federico raised his right hand and replied, ‘Saludes, Senor,’ as he passed by. He turned and watched the old man disappear down the stony path clucking at his donkey and exclaiming ‘Ay, burro!’ every time it felt disposed to stop. Federico realised at once that from now on he could walk unremarked and unmolested as a hunter, and he laughed at himself for behaving so fearfully hitherto. That night he set a trap as Pedro did, and in the morning he found he
had a small brocket. He did not shoot it, because bullets are precious and rare, but he knocked it senseless with a rock and cut its throat with his stolen machete.

Later that morning he entered a pueblito with the deer across his shoulders and swapped it for a fine knife, a chicken, a kilo of dried fish, matches, and a pair of Indian sandals with soles made of tyre rubber. He stayed long enough to partake of a little of his deer, which was roasted that evening, and to take a small portion of its liver, the seat of its spirit, into the wood. Here he wrapped it in a dried banana leaf, and burnt it at the base of a giant brazil nut tree in order to honour the angels that watched over his fortune. He gave thanks to them and also muttered a secreto which would bind them absolutely to guide his footsteps for at least one cycle of the moon. Back in the pueblito he knew that his prayer was answered when he was warned that not much further up the Sierra were guerrilleros who would probably steal his gun.

He met them three days later when he was rudely awakened in the middle of the night by a sharp kick in the ribs. He sat up with surprise and saw that he was encircled by four silhouettes, each of which featured the unmistakable shadow of a rifle.

‘And who are you, companero?’ said one of the silhouettes, in a voice that sounded as though spoken through broken teeth.

Federico began to tremble with both fear and excitement, but mostly the former. ‘I am Federico,’ he said, in a voice as clear and bold as he could manage. ‘And if you are the guerrilleros, I have come to join you.’

A torch clicked and shone unexpectedly in his face, so that he put up a hand to block its light from his eyes. One of the men stepped forward, grasped his hand, twisted it in a movement of the deftest violence and wrenched his arm up behind his back. Federico blenched with pain and blinked against the terrible light of the torch. He realised that there was a knife against his throat, and the thought came to him that these were not guerrilleros but the Army.