The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Fascista!’ replied the lawyer.

  The Colonel punched the man hard in the stomach, and he collapsed on the floor groaning and doubling up. The Colonel, raging with contempt and disgust, kicked the man hard in the kidneys twice, and then dragged him across the floor and out into the corridor. He opened the door of one of the little rooms that used to be for visiting officers, and threw the lawyer inside. As the man groaned and moaned on the floor the Colonel said, ‘When you can talk to me with some respect in a civilised manner, then I will let you go.’

  The Colonel was shaking with rage and indignation when he sat down at his table and tried to prepare himself for the next interview. In spite of himself he shouted at the young woman and made her cry.

  Two hours later the man was banging on his door, shouting, ‘I need to go to the toilet!’

  The Colonel listened from his office and the rage rose up in him again. He strode to the door of the man’s room and said in a voice full of disgust, ‘You can damn well piss youself.’

  When the Colonel drove angrily home that night in his State Telephone Company Ford Falcon, the radical lawyer was still in his cell, unfed, pissing in the corner of the room.

  24

  * * *

  GLORIA AND DONA CONSTANZA HATCH A PLOT

  EVERYTHING IN URUGUAY had traditionally been exceedingly staid and tedious. The country had been run for years by two parties of the centre, the Colorados and the Blancos, which commanded hereditary loyalties rather like the Whigs and the Tories in eighteenth-century Britain. However, any differences in their policies were only vaguely discernible. The situation was analogous to that in Colombia, with its Liberals and Conservatives.

  However, things had begun to change when dozens of enthusiastic splinter parties began to proliferate in the universities, where the more or less idle children of the upper and middle classes had ample time and money to become disillusioned with everything and talk endlessly through the night of how it all had to be changed. Gloria de Escobal, whose father was an ambassador, oscillated between joining the Frente Amplio and the Party For The Victory Of The People, and finally opted for the latter, even though it was very much smaller.

  Gloria was twenty-five years old, had been educated at Roedean in Brighton, England, and had married a man with so much money that she had had nothing to do except fly to Buenos Aires to go shopping or go to Punto del Este and lie in the sun. In the winter she would usually go to Italy.

  She bore her husband a son and then announced that she wanted to go to university. Her husband and family protested, but she went anyway, and her husband did not finally divorce her until her left-wing associations became too embarrassing and dangerous. With the permission of Gloria’s parents he abducted the child and then won legal custody in the courts, so Gloria decided to have another child on her own, whose father was an irrelevance.

  Gloria was not a member of the Tupamaros guerrillas, but because of their activities it very soon became uncomfortable to be left wing at all. The placid government of the centre found itself, as did the entire country, whirling on its heels in confusion and indecision wondering where the next grenade was going to come from and who was going to be assassinated next. The Tupamaros thought that throwing cobblestones like the students of Paris was effeminate and ineffective, but were as surprised as anyone else when the exasperated military seized power and repressed the whole country barbarously for eleven years.

  Gloria de Escobal’s little party was still technically legal, but she began to notice that familiar faces were going missing, and she began to hear stories of torture and murder. She packed up her possessions, gathered her baby in her arms, and moved to Argentina. She settled in a very expensive flat in Belgrano, Buenos Aires, and lived comfortably enough on money sent by her father and on what she earned as a secretary.

  She tried to persuade the armed men who abducted her to let her keep her baby with her, but they told her it would be taken care of and she had to leave it in the flat alone, even though it was only one year old. Gloria’s father was told that the baby was with Gloria in prison. Gloria was told that the baby was with her father. The baby was taken to Santiago de Chile and dumped in a public toilet. The men also took her possessions and sold them for their own profit.

  Gloria was taken blindfolded to the Ondetti Engineering Works, recently gone into liquidation, and its buildings empty except for prisoners. Gloria heard the metal doors close behind her and was pushed down the metal steps into the basement. She was blindfolded for two weeks and was not allowed to speak, but she was astonished when she realised from the whisperings of the guards that they, and all the prisoners, were also Uruguayans.

  Gloria was fed three times over the fortnight and did not sleep at all because of the screaming and because the torturers used to put on record players very loudly to try to drown the cries of agony. Sometimes they tortured the prisoners in groups, and sometimes Gloria was taken out alone.

  Compared to the Argentinian torturers the Uruguayans were very civilised. All that they did to Gloria was to bind her wrists behind her back with piano wire and then string her up by them from a beam, with her feet in a tank of salted water. Then they gave her electric shocks all over her body, but mostly of course on her breasts and genitals. They were supposed to ask her about other Uruguayans in exile in Argentina, and about left-wing activists she knew of in Uruguay, but usually they forgot.

  Gloria was lucky that she only lost the use of her arms for a few weeks and was taken to a military airfield to be flown to Montevideo where she was imprisoned without being tortured or murdered. This was because the Argentinians, in a further exemplary case of international Inter-Intelligence Service Cooperation, had told them of a wonderful idea for legitimising her captivity.

  The group who had been brought back from Buenos Aires were bundled into a lorry and taken to the Villa Maravillosa, where they were herded into a room, and remained there handcuffed whilst the army filled it with rifles and ammunition.

  When the television cameras arrived the prisoners’ hoodwinks were taken off and they were led out of the Villa Maravillosa in single file and in handcuffs. Then the TV crews were brought into the Villa and shown the terrorists’ enormous cache of arms.

  As Gloria was now a prisoner officially her father, the ambassador, was able to pull strings to get her out. The prison psychiatrist in return for certain inducements diagnosed her as having been temporarily insane and under the influence of brainwashing, and she was released on the understanding that she should leave Uruguay and that her father was to be held personally responsible for her future conduct.

  Childless and homeless, Gloria wandered those parts of Latin-America which would still allow her in, until she met Remedios in Mexico City, where the latter was trying to recruit exiled Montoneros for her guerrilla group at home in her own country. Gloria stopped being a theoretical communist who sympathised with the terrorists from a distance, and went back with Remedios to become a practising communist who actually was a terrorist.

  Gloria dropped her upper-middle-class airs and attitudes in the mountains, but her aura of culture and conviction gave her a kind of concentrated self-confidence that the other guerrilleros respected. It was tacitly understood that if anything ever happened to Remedios, Gloria would probably become the leader. She took Tomas as her lover, but never bore him a child because of the effects of the torture.

  Gloria and Dona Constanza became close friends, which was surprising in some ways and unsurprising in others. It was unsurprising because their backgrounds were similar, but it was surprising because whereas Gloria was intensely serious and intellectual and had the air of one who would never again know happiness, Dona Constanza was intensely frivolous, could not be bothered to talk about politics, and was deliriously happy all the time. Perhaps they became so close because they were both excellent warriors, because Gonzago and Tomas were brothers, and because they each saw in the other’s qualities something to be envied.

&nb
sp; One day Constanza had returned in disarray and covered with the droppings of swifts from a particularly exhilarating and virtuoso performance with Gonzago on a ledge behind a waterfall, and was sitting with Gloria at the edge of the camp watching the long procession of leaf-cutter ants bearing their supplies home. They were like a band of little guerrilleros.

  ‘Do you ever think of your husband?’ asked Gloria suddenly.

  ‘Not really,’ replied Constanza. ‘That all seems a long time ago.’

  ‘It was only a few months,’ observed Gloria.

  ‘I know, but all the same. I wonder what he is doing. I expect he is making purple earthquakes with some mulatta girl.’

  ‘I expect he has bitten his fingernails back to the armpits with worrying about you,’ replied Gloria. There was a silence. ‘I often think of my husband. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very fond of Tomaso, and I could not go back to all that, but I did love him, especially to begin with. One has so many romantic dreams.’

  ‘What was he like?’ asked Constanza.

  ‘Oh, tall, good-looking, very rich.’

  ‘Sounds lovely,’ remarked Constanza.

  ‘Well it was, but he never really knew me. He never even wanted to or tried to. I was just his pretty wife whom he kissed on the forehead when he got home.’

  ‘Hugh did not even do that,’ said Constanza. ‘He only talked about rugby and polo. He never fucked me into orange fragments like Gonzago.’

  ‘Then he is probably not making purple earthquakes with some mulatta girl, now, is he?’

  ‘Oh,’ laughed Constanza, ‘I think he was always doing that, and that is why he was not interested in me.’

  ‘I wonder whether your husband ever got the money together to leave under the bridge. Do you think he did?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so,’ said Constanza. ‘He always did the right thing, and always on time. He was like a German.’

  ‘Why don’t we go and get the money off him then? I expect he has still got it, if he is as punctilious as you say.’

  ‘I expect he has been waiting for us to get in touch,’ said Constanza.

  ‘All we have to do is give him a new ransom note. Then we swap you for the money.’

  ‘And then,’ continued Dona Constanza, ‘I run away again.’

  ‘It is a bit mean, though, isn’t it, to do something like that to someone? I mean it is completely unprincipled.’

  ‘We will give him the money back after the victory,’ said Constanza cynically. ‘Let us go and see what Remedios says.’

  Remedios was very dubious indeed. ‘For one thing it appears that the Army are active in the area. I do not want to end up losing men and equipment for nothing. Secondly, how do I know that you, Constanza, have not dreamed this up as a means of escape and that afterwards you will not betray us?’

  Constanza was very offended, and an indignant expression crossed her face. ‘That is ridiculous!’ she said. ‘For a start, even if I do not come back, you have still got half a million dollars in return. And I could not possibly bring soldiers and things back here because I do not know where we are!’

  ‘We could blindfold her on the way there,’ said Gloria, ‘if you really think it is necessary.’

  ‘I will agree to that,’ said Constanza, still angry with Remedios. ‘But I am coming back anyway, because of Gonzago and because I want to be here.’

  Remedios sighed, still looking doubtful. ‘I will think about it,’ she said, ‘and I will tell you my final decision tomorrow.’

  As Gloria and Constanza walked away from the hut Gloria said, ‘By the way, why have you never become pregnant by Gonzago? Isn’t it about time?’

  ‘Oh,’ replied Constanza, ‘I thought two children were enough. I got myself sterilised in New York.’

  Gloria was surprised. ‘I thought you were a Catholic!’

  ‘Oh yes, but religion has nothing to do with the practicalities of life. Why have you not got pregnant by Tomas?’

  Gloria smiled very sadly. ‘I too was sterilised, in Buenos Aires.’

  In the morning Remedios changed her mind. She sent Federico to fetch the two women, and they proceeded to her hut in a mood of eager anticipation. ‘I wonder what she is going to say?’ said Constanza.

  What Remedios said was that she had seen Aurelio, ‘that funny-looking cholo’, and that he had told her that when he had gone to Chiriguana to sell his maize the Army had just left. ‘But he did say,’ added Remedios, ‘that there are still Jungle Rangers patrolling. He says they are a long way to the east and the local Indians are giving them a hard time, so we should be all right. We do not know exactly what the Mountain Rangers are doing, but that is not going to be your problem down on the savannah.’

  ‘Does that mean we can go?’ asked Gloria.

  ‘Yes, it means you can go. Aurelio is coming here tomorrow morning to guide you through the jungle so that you do not fall into his traps, and he will guide you back again. As to precisely when he does that, you will have to arrange with him yourselves. As for you, Constanza . . .’ Remedios looked hard into her eyes, ‘I have decided to trust you, but if you should double-cross us, I promise you you will be tracked down and shot. Do you understand?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Constanza. ‘But as I am not going to betray you, you will not have to shoot me.’

  ‘Good,’ said Remedios. ‘Gloria, you are in command of this expedition. I want you to take Federico because he comes from that village himself and knows his way around. I also think you should take two others with you.’

  Remedios smiled to herself. She knew perfectly well that they would choose Gonzago and Tomas, and she understood that Constanza was much less likely to escape with Gonzago jealously waiting near Don Hugh’s hacienda. ‘And by the way, Constanza . . .’

  ‘Remedios?’

  ‘If your husband has any guns or ammunition or explosives in his hacienda, we would be very grateful for them.’

  Aurelio was waiting for them at dawn and led them away without a word. He took them through the jungle unerringly even though at times it seemed that there was no path. There is no need here to describe the journey, but let it be said it was long, made insufferable by carnivorous insects, it was humid and sweaty, and also let it be said that Aurelio could see Parlanchina accompanying them all the way, just a couple of steps behind Federico. Her long hair was flowing about her hips, and she was chatting all the time as her ocelot trotted beside her.

  Aurelio left the guerrilleros at the edge of the jungle, where it becomes savannah, and pointed out to Federico exactly how they were to get to the village, even though Federico already knew. They were to meet again at that spot in precisely one week. ‘If you are not here,’ said Aurelio, ‘I will wait two more days.’

  After they had gone Aurelio spoke to Parlanchina: ‘Gwubba, is it well that you should love a man who is not a spirit?’

  ‘Papacito,’ she said, ‘I know things that you do not.’

  All of them were surprised when they surveyed the village through Gloria’s binoculars, the very binoculars that had once been General Fuerte’s. All of the fields around it had been razed, and a rampart topped with barbed wire had been constructed at each end of the street.

  ‘Have the Army taken it?’ asked Constanza.

  ‘Let us go and find out,’ replied Gloria.

  When they were closer Gloria handed the binoculars to Federico. ‘See if anyone looks familiar.’ Federico scanned the village with growing excitement.

  ‘I have seen my father!’ he cried. ‘He has a new gun! I have seen Misael and Josef, both with guns, and I see Dolores the whore smoking a puro on the rampart. Ay! They are all armed!’

  ‘I think that they have organised a defence against the Army,’ said Constanza. ‘They had double reason to.’

  Cautiously the party approached the village. When they came out on to the razed field, Federico waved his rifle and shouted, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! It is I, Federico! It is I!’

  A figure detach
ed itself from the small group of people that came to see what the shouting was about, and began to walk towards them. It stopped, as though to make sure what it was seeing, and then began to run. Federico ran forward too.

  Father and son stood facing each other in the middle of the field. Neither spoke, but both smiled. Federico saw that his father looked the same, but smaller, and Sergio saw that his son had grown into a man. Then Sergio’s eyes fell onto the Lee Enfield. ‘My son,’ he said. ‘You stole my rifle. With it you killed an innocent man. I have been ashamed.’

  Federico held the rifle before him in both hands. ‘Father, it has since killed some men who were not innocent. Here it is, I return it.’

  Sergio took the rifle and weighed it fondly in his hands. ‘It is a fine gun.’ He unslung the M.16 carbine from his shoulder and presented it to Federico. ‘I think you will need a gun, Federico, so take this one. Pedro stole it from the soldiers. I do not need two rifles.’

  Father and son embraced, both of them weeping, whilst the little band of guerrilleros stood waiting discreetly on one side.

  Then they walked together into the village, creating a sensation that has been seen there neither before nor since. It was not the return of Federico that caused it; everyone had always known that, as sons do, he would one day return.

  What caused the stir was the sight of their former mistress dressed in khaki combat fatigues, slim and sunburnt, with her hair loose and flowing down her back, with two grenades swinging from her belt, and a semi-automatic rifle slung across her back. They did not know what to say or think, but as each one recognised her their jaws dropped in amazement.

  Dona Constanza put one hand on her hip and said, ‘What the blue fuck are you staring at?’ That caused further amazement, and to one old man who followed her, gaping and pointing, she said, ‘If you do not close your mouth, I am going to fill it with horse-shit and kick your black arse until it bleeds!’