The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

by Louis de Bernières

  Olsen left the country without telling anyone and went to the United States, where he received a lot of help and good advice from Senators and Congressmen of the Democratic Party, and then flew on to Norway. A few days later a large gang of armed men wearing anomalous-looking trilbys burst into his flat in its plush suburb and, not finding Olsen, shot his cleaning maid instead.

  Back in Europe, Olsen campaigned tirelessly. His Holiness The Pope wrote three times asking Regina’s whereabouts; the American Secretary of State demanded the same information when he arrived on an official visit; the International Free Church Committee in Switzerland wrote, demanding to know; the Labour and the Democrat Parties in Great Britain wrote, demanding to know, as did the Socialists in France. To all of these, the President wrote to say that he was still looking.

  Meanwhile, death went on as normal in the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. Colonel Asado had had a brilliant idea to save himself paperwork, and he and his men cruised around the city in their Ford Falcons looking for people who looked like subversives, drove the kind of cars that subversives drove, lived in the kinds of areas where subversives lived, and if they were good-looking women, so much the better, unless you were El Verdugo, who liked to sodomise young men as well.

  One day Colonel Asado said to El Bano, ‘I bet you I can bring in a prettier woman than you!’

  ‘How much?’ replied El Bano, irked by the challenge.

  ‘One thousand pesos!’ exclaimed Asado.

  ‘I accept the bet!’ cried El Bano.

  When El Bano returned with his catch, Asado was already raping in turn two little sixteen-year-olds with their arms tied behind their backs, and their faces streaming with tears. El Bano watched them sobbing and said to Asado, ‘OK, you win.’

  In the meantime the embassies of foreign nations were becoming ever more sceptical about the President’s stock reply to their enquiries about missing persons; the President would always say that they were the victims of the internal feuding of the left wing. Then someone in the American embassy began to keep statistics and realised that people vanished in batches: fourteen Liberal Christians, four progressive Catholics, seven nuns of the ‘third-world’ movement, twenty prostitutes, forty-one Rosicrucians, fifty-three Trade Unionists, twenty-five homosexuals, nineteen hippies, five artists, eleven journalists, four film producers, four magazine editors, seven authors, eight Evangelists, three Anglicans, eleven Mormons, thirty-five Jehovah’s Witnesses, eight Hare Krishna devotees, two from the Divine Light Mission, eighty-five Socialists, sixty Democrats, forty from the Vanguard Party, thirty-three from the National Party, twenty from the Liberal Democratic Party, forty-one from the Radical Party, eighteen from the Christian Democrats, forty-three from the Social Democrats, two thousand, one hundred and fourteen from the Communist Party, sixty-six from the Human Rights Movement, one thousand, five hundred and sixty-three from the Women’s Rights organisations, one hundred pacifists, one hundred from the Anti-Nuclear League, twenty-two Rotarians, nine hundred and three from the Marxist Front, twenty scoutmasters, and nearly two thousand Jews and Zionists. The remaining category, who disappeared regularly, and not in batches, was ‘young women’.

  The United States Embassy sent copies of this list to the other major embassies, who sent copies of it home to their respective Foreign Offices, and the President one morning found himself deluged with official formal protests from other countries about ‘organised totalitarian repression’. Even the Soviet Union protested, now that it had imported all the food it had been angling for, and only Great Britain lodged no protest as usual.

  But the President had bigger worries of his own. In a country which fights no wars, where the life of the people is an offence to the obsessively ordered mind of the military, and where government is so chaotic and corrupt that most civilians would prefer a military government, it is a top priority to find something for the military to do, in order to prevent them concocting a coup. The President was occupying himself with trying to find an external enemy, and to this end he was reading his way through piles of history books, and keeping the state archivist busy by ordering him to check through all the old treaties that had not been destroyed by mould or termites, been burnt by being used to light the gasfire, or been sold to American universities. He found that in 1611 his country had owned a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which had been captured by English privateers and claimed for King James, and which, since then, had remained the property of the British. The President consulted the collection of the National Geographic magazine in the State University Library, and discovered that the island was uninhabited except by turtles, lizards, wild pigs, seals, wild goats, sea-bird colonies, finches, and a ship-wrecked sailor from New Zealand who now lived there as a hermit.

  The President consulted his astrologer, his Tarot card reader, and the Chiefs of Staff, who were all unanimous in approving the plan, and accordingly the President released to the press his ‘Carta Historica’ which is still printed in full and with pride in the nation’s history books.

  Compatriots!

  There is an infamy and a shame that has hung over the national conscience for so long that it leaves there a scar which tarnishes perpetually the otherwise brightly shining star of our honour! It is my duty, as it is yours, my countrymen and fellow patriots, to remove this scar, to heal finally this suppurating wound!

  As you will all realise, I am referring to La Isla De Los Puercos, in the Pacific, which, though originally ours, was stolen from us and colonised by an infamous colonial power whose name I cannot bring to pass my lips, so foully does it taste upon them! You all know to which colonial empire I refer, and I know that you hate it with all your hearts!

  Accordingly I have ordered our noble armed forces to retake the island, regardless of sacrifice, to salvage our honour, and for the greater glory of our blessed and beloved fatherland! ¡Los Puercos son los nuestros! Patria o muerte!

  The British had no idea that Endeavour Island was known in Spanish as ‘Pigs Island’, and failed to realise that it was Crown Property that was about to be invaded. But the armed forces and the nation were united in war-fever. Everywhere graffiti and posters sprang up proclaiming ‘¡Los Puercos Son Los Nuestros!’ and crowds gathered in the square outside the Presidential Palace shouting and chanting, flushed with patriotic fervour. It did not matter that no one knew where the island was, what mattered was becoming euphoric and drunk, and even embracing policemen and soldiers. Never had a nation been so united, and even Asado gave his victims a day off from being tortured and raped.

  The President informed the Chiefs of Staff that the island would be heavily defended, and that a very large force would be needed to stage a successful attack. Accordingly, the Navy, which had only two battle-cruisers (American, survivors of World War II), and four frigates (coal-fired, British, built in the 1920s), commandeered five merchantmen to transport the soldiers and the coal needed for the frigates. The Air Force realised that the island was out of range of its aircraft, and accordingly had huge fuel tanks mounted beneath either wing of its aircraft, which could be jettisoned when empty. The Army realised that its huge provisions warehouses were empty because of black-marketeering, and hoped there would be enough food on the island when they arrived with five thousand conscripts (General Ramirez did not want to risk losing his regulars).

  In the glorious battle that ensued, the Air Force lost ten planes. Two were lost on take-off because the pilots were not used to handling aircraft with a full load of bombs plus extra fuel tanks. Three were lost because the small explosive charges placed to jettison the extra tanks were in fact too large, and the wings were blown off. Three were lost because the pilots were unused to long-distance flying over the open sea, and they got lost, ran out of fuel, and crashed ignominiously into the waves. The final two were lost because they failed to identify themselves when flying low across the path of the USS New California. They were brought down by guided missiles. The ten aircraft that reached
La Isla De Los Puercos dropped their payload with immaculate precision and killed a large number of turtles.

  The Navy arrived and shelled the island whilst the soldiers, seasick, starving, and covered from head to foot in coal dust, disembarked. They landed on both sides of the island with the intention of enclosing the defenders in an inescapable ring of attackers. They advanced boldly with the Navy’s shells crashing ahead of them, and sometimes among them, until the soldiers of the eastern side saw the soldiers of the western side coming over the crest towards them. At last, the enemy! A ferocious battle ensued that raged for four hours until the commanders’ radio-operators managed to speak to each other during a lull. A ceasefire was ordered, a victory declared, and the soldiers embraced each other, weeping and cheering. At the top of the hill the National Flag was raised as the many verses of the National Anthem were sung with unusual enthusiasm, and the army made camp.

  Nine hundred and forty men were killed, and roughly two thousand were injured. The soldiers stayed on the island until all the animals were eaten, and then the Navy took them home. They arrived, seasick, starving, and covered once more from head to foot in coal-dust, to a heroes’ welcome. They were fed for nothing in restaurants, entertained for nothing by prostitutes, and feted unsparingly by rapturous crowds during a week-long national holiday. The press printed banner headlines: ‘!AHORA LOS PUERCOS SON VERDADERAMENTE LOS NUESTROS!’ (Now the Pigs are Truly Ours!) and nine hundred and forty soldiers’ names were read out at the State Service of Remembrance, plus ten names of the Air Force, and one name of a Navy man who had died in a boiler explosion on one of the frigates. Nine hundred and fifty families were promised generous state pensions which for some reason that they could never understand they were unable to extract from the bureaucracy.

  When the British finally realised what had happened, and a task force of Royal Marines arrived, they found only a lot of animals skeletons and an old hermit from New Zealand who was using an unfamiliar Latin-American flag as a cloak.

  The President calculated somewhat arbitrarily that he had reduced the chances of a coup by ten per cent. He called a snap election which he would have won on the ‘Los Puercos Victory Vote’ even if he had not taken the precaution of filling the ballot boxes in advance. The country’s few demographers noted wearily and cynically that the population had yet again appeared to double in the five years between elections.

  32

  * * *

  EXODUS

  ON THE 28TH of October 1746 the citizens of Lima had just celebrated the feast of St Simon and St Jude. It was a beautiful night of the full moon, and the earthquake totally destroyed the city in three minutes, killing six thousand. The ocean retreated for two miles, and the ensuing tidal wave rushed in and destroyed Callao. In 1647, on the 13th of May, two thousand were killed by an earthquake in Santiago. On the 31st of March 1650 an earthquake lasting a quarter of an hour obliterated the city of Cuzco and a priest hung for five days over a precipice, suspended by his ecclesiastical robes. An image of the Virgin torn apart in the Church of San Francisco miraculously repaired itself, and once in Lima a statue of St Peter turned face-about on its pedestal. In the village of Chapi-Chapi the image of the Virgin processed from its niche in the wall to the door of the chapel. When the priest tried to remove it to the village for safety, he was prevented by a hailstorm which ceased when he restored the Virgin to her niche.

  The mountains along the western side of the Americas daily give birth to themselves with heroic pangs, convulsions, and contractions. As the continents drift westwards, the great plates of the planet grind, slide and slip, squashing the Pacific coast and compressing its mountains higher by the year. They rise faster even than they split and flake in the frosts and are ground down by the ice of glaciers, the scouring of the dusty wind, and the buffeting of the hail. The great chain of mountains, of which the travailing Andes form five thousand miles, are like a Leviathan in the throes of tormented constipation and agonising gripes of wind. The titanic pressure upon the bowels and sphincters of the earth produces the most gargantuan haemorrhoids, the most prodigious fistulas and the most formidable colonic prolapses imaginable by God or man. Valleys disappear beneath torrents of mud, crevasses open and close, rivers change course, and the mountains are thrown ever higher. The passes are so high that once upon a time the only sensible way to get from Lima to Iquitos was to take several months by steamer, via Liverpool, for the price of sixty pounds sterling.

  If the Andes are the bilious excrement of a planet’s indigestion, what a palace of pure beauty they are also! They beckon with promises of solitude and peace, with whispers of gold, silver, lead, copper, clean waters, aphrodisiac air, lost civilisations and hidden prelapsarian gardens of innocence.

  After the massacre at Chiriguana, Remedios and the entire population knew that they would never again know peace and isolation. They knew that sooner or later whole armies would descend upon them to pillage, sack and rape, and render their victory hollow with their vengeance. They knew that next time there would be tanks and gunships, howling jets; and not demoralised conscripts but the élite regulars who guarded the portachuelos on the borders. Everyone knew that it was time to leave and start a new life elsewhere. Many left to join relations in other areas, but two thousand people joined the small army of those who were to go into exile in the mountains, cross the border, and start anew in some forgotten valley of safety. Remedios and her guerrilleros, having seen, dealt, heard and smelt total war at first hand, gave up their dream of armed victory and joined the dream for the start of a new creation, a new world, and a better way of life. But they took their own and the soldiers’ weapons with them, in case of external threat and from force of habit. Don Emmanuel went to see Don Hugh, Don Pedro, and the French couple, and advised them to leave before the invasion broke upon them with the force of a holocaust. Don Hugh and Don Pedro flew to the capital; Antoine and Françoise with their children, but without ever knowing why, joined the refugees for the sake of their vision of elysium and because of Don Emmanuel’s enthusiasm. If it did not work out, they could still return to France.

  The preparations for departure took two weeks. Every possible item of food, tool, utensil, household good and object of sentimental value was packed up in bundles ready to load onto the animals. Don Emmanuel and Hectoro organised parties of vaqueros to round up all his herds and those of the people who were also leaving. Unashamedly he rustled all of Don Hugh’s and Don Pedro’s horses and cattle, knowing that they would rebuild their herds on insurance money and governmental reparations.

  The whole area became a scene of chaotic last-minute packings, unpackings, discardings and retrievals, hampered by the antics of the cats, who took it as a matter of course that all this was a game for their amusement. Hectoro became so maddened by their incursions into his luggage that he shot one at close range; the animal blinked at him and patted at the tassels of his machete scabbard and the leather draw-strings of his bombachos. Realising that the animals were indestructible, Hectoro put away his revolver and resigned himself to their quirky attentions.

  Don Emmanuel and his men roped the horses together from the halter in hierarchical order, with his grey stallion at the front. He did the same with the mules and donkeys. At the front of each string of cattle he placed a bull, and at the front of the foremost string of cattle he put Cacho Mocho, the bull with the broken horn, who was the undisputed king of all the local bulls, a veritable giant who was the only bull who had been allowed into Don Emmanuel’s garden to eat the flowers, and was as gentle as a virgin’s touch. The chickens were to be carried in boxes on the pack animals, and the goats were to be driven in flocks, being too wilful and excitable to rope together. The dogs, they knew, would follow anyway.

  At dawn on the day of departure the thousands of animals were loaded with the impedimenta of exile, and by midday the work was completed. Each person was assigned responsibility for an equal section of the train, and then when the heat and humidity grew too oppressi
ve and people became tetchy and irritated, everyone retired for siesta, except for Dona Constanza and Gonzago, who went to make love furiously by the Mula, and Profesor Luis and Farides, who went to make love more gently and decorously on the table in the schoolhouse.

  When everybody re-emerged in the early evening, the cats were once more febrile and jumpy, and the animals were plainly close to panic. It was difficult to get them all moving, and they were almost impossible to control. Dust rose in asphyxiating fogs, loads fell off and were replaced amidst oaths and expletives, people’s feet were trodden on by hoofs, mules lay down and refused to move, and cats darted among their feet, or hitched rides on the other animals, digging in their claws to stay seated and making the animals snort and rear and roll their eyes with anxiety at the pricking in their necks.

  That evening the pilgrims made camp on the edge of the savannah, and the lorries, armoured cars and tanks began to roll out, column after column, from Valledupar. In one of the lorries sat Figueras with his platoon of twenty men, demoted to Lieutenant, and stripped of his decorations despite having personally arrested a demented terrorist with bagfuls of identity discs who had wandered through the gates of the headquarters with a cat in his arms.

  Early in the morning the animals were close to panic again as Aurelio led the column through the jungle. Up in the trees the monkeys whooped, crashing from branch to branch, and the toucans and their gaudy cousins shrieked and flew in circles. ‘Something is very wrong,’ said Aurelio, ‘the animals are unhappy with this path. With your permission we will go up this hill and walk along the ridges.’

  ‘It is all one to me,’ replied Pedro, and the column moved leftwards to climb the long gentle slope through the extravagant lush vegetation.