The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

by Louis de Bernières

  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.

  39

  * * *

  HIS EXCELLENCY BECOMES AN ADEPT AND BEGETS A MAGICAL CHILD

  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 Foreig
n 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:

  ‘The Mother Eagle’ = mucous membranes

  ‘Cucurbit’ = the female genitalia

  ‘The White Eagle’ = the female lubricant fluid

  ‘The Menstruum’ = another word for the above

  ‘Alembic retort’ = mucous membranes during intercourse

  ‘The Eagle’ = the female

  ‘The Lion’ = the male

  ‘The Red Lion’ = semen

  ‘Elixir’ = semen

  ‘Quintessence’ = transmuted semen

  ‘Sublimate’ = physical ecstasy transmuted into spiritual beatitude.

  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.’

  Then they would lie together on the bed exchanging caresses until it was possible to proceed to the next phase, in which she would straddle his lap with her arms about his neck, endeavouring to stimulate solely by voluntary contractions of the vagina. She eventually became very adept at this, and they would be able to continue for two or three hours, gazing in complete silence into each other’s eyes until they were quite hypnotised, communing with their Higher Selves, attaining peaks of ecstasy, obtaining knowledge of God, imagining that they were Isis and Osiris, and strongly visualising a reduction in the national debt.

  In this version of the rite they forbade themselves to achieve a climax or even to desire one, because this would make it possible to protract the ritual indefinitely, because it was good for building up magical energy, and because like that one could repeat the rite endlessly without become ennervated.

  This procedure produced in them an extraordinary sensation of energy and well-being, and was so delicious and exalting that the President found himself neglecting affairs of state altogether and painting pictures of the angels that he had encountered in his hypnogogic visions. He was also very pleased with himself because being obliged not to reach orgasm had cured him of the impotence caused by the old man’s terror of never coming at all. Nowadays he had to have a pre-arranged signal with his wife to prevent her skilful contractions causing him to be carried away on the wave’s crest.

  Having perfected this mystical rite, they proceeded to the third degree, which was identical, up to a point, with the second. The difference was that after two or three hours the couple were to allow their massively pent up desires to explode simultaneously into cataclysmic climax, during the ecstacies of which they were to visualise as powerfully as possible the reductions of the national debt.

  However, it was not quite as easy in practice as it was in theory. The first time they did indeed manage to incandesce with divine fire at exactly the same moment, but it was so overwhelming that they both forgot to visualise the ‘magical child’ of reducing the debt.

  The second time the President arrived at his destination before his wife, and was too annoyed with himself to visualise properly. The third time he could not arrive at all, because he lost his concentration and his state of exalted bliss in trying not to repeat the fiasco of the second attempt.

  On the fourth attempt, however, everything proceeded perfectly according to alchemical purpose and they sat entwined, quivering, trembling, and thrilling in mystical ecstacy for what felt like hours on the borderline between pleasurable pain and painful pleasure. They saw angels fanning them with their wings, the bed levitated itself into the air and revolved as it hovered, a window broke into shards with a sharp report, the door opened and closed of itself, they felt the kiss of God on their fevered brows, and they visualised with great clarity the vaults of the treasury overflowing with gold.

  When it was over the bed returned gently to its proper position and the exhausted and inspired couple collapsed sideways in each other’s arms amid yelps and tormented gasps. ‘Daddikins!’ exclaimed the President’s wife. ‘O Daddikins!’ And they both fell into a blissful slumber that preceded many happy months of creating poltergeist effects, states of Holy Bliss, and vivid pictures of national solvency.

  Every day His Excellency would call for a Treasury report and peruse it for signs of the birth of the magical child. He noted with satisfaction that a Caribbean hurricane had raised the price of bananas and tropical fruit, and that the coffee harvest had not been ruined by rains as in the previous year. He watched the debt gradually reduce itself to $50,000,000.

  All the same he was not convinced that the alchemy was responsible for this limited result, and his faith in it, despite the assurances of the Foreign Secretary, was beginning to diminish. Then his expedition to find El Dorado returned to give him the happy news that their engineer had discovered a new deposit of emeralds in the Sierra whilst collecting birds’ eggs.

  Having learned the lessons of history the President did not sell the commission to the North Americans, but set up a State Mining Company with government credit. In order to attempt to obviate the appalling and inevitable corruption and inefficiency that would result from such a project he decided to appoint a military officer of undoubted integrity and patriotism to run it. He had just sent the telegram to General Fuerte in Cesar when he received a cable from Valledupar that General Fuerte had been assassinated during the night.

  Despondent and frustrated, he went to visit his wife, who had been in bed all day with stomach cramps which he thought must be due to their supernatural alchemical exertions. He was met in the corridor by his wife’s lady-in-waiting, who was screaming hysterically and crossing herself with the rapidity of a machine-gun and the fervour of Saint Catherine. Unable to get any sense out of her even by slapping and shaking her, he entered his wife’s chamber to find her cooing over a small furry black bundle that was suckling at her breast whilst pressing rhythmically against it with its paws.

  She looked up as he entered and smiled coyly. ‘Look Daddikins,’ she pouted. ‘I d
id not even know I was pregnant, and I’ve just had a little baby. Isn’t it sweet?’

  His hands behind his back, he bent over and scrutinised the new arrival. He straightened up and pursed his lips.

  ‘Are you sure that I am the father?’ he said. ‘It appears to be a cat.’

  40

  * * *

  THE THREEFOLD ASSASSINATION OF GENERAL CARLO MARIA FUERTE

  GENERAL CARLO MARIA FUERTE had taken every precaution; he had immediately despatched the Portachuelo Guards back to their bases on the remote mountain borders, and had ensured that the Brigadier was the man who signed all orders and directives emanating from Valledupar. None the less, General Ramirez heard on the military grapevine, as one day he was bound to, that General Fuerte had reappeared in Cesar and had resumed his duties. He sent General Fuerte a telegram congratulating him on his recovery, and adding that he had personally dealt with the renegade officers who had imprisoned and mistreated him. Then he arranged for an assassination, to be blamed on the left wing, and wrote a letter to the New York Herald denouncing as forgeries the documents that they had been publishing. He drafted a resignation note to the President, re-read it many times as he wrenched off his nails with his teeth, and then tore it up.

  General Fuerte knew what he should expect, and doubled the security around the base. However, he resented the curtailments to his own freedom, and still went on his walks with his huge cat (which could now only get one paw through the catflap) and sometimes with Capitan Papagato and his four cats.