Don Emmanuel had an idea. He came up to the front and said, ‘I think we should cut a couple of trees across the path so that they have difficulty following us. Like this one.’ He pointed to a tall bushy tree by the pathside.
‘You start cutting it then,’ said Aurelio, and he and Pedro nudged and winked, and watched with eager amusement as Don Emmanuel drew his machete and swung it. The blade clanged against the bark and leapt back, ringing and quivering, and Don Emmanuel let it fall to the ground so that he could clutch his jarred wrist and fingers, and dance up and down grimacing. He bent forward to see that there was no mark on the tree, and looked up to see Aurelio and Pedro grinning.
‘That tree is a quebracha,’ said Aurelio. ‘The wood is so hard that it can be used for paving roads. Try another one.’
‘Quebracha?’ said Don Emmanuel. ‘An axe-breaker?’
‘And a machete-breaker too,’ said Pedro, handing Don Emmanuel his machete and pointing to the section that had chipped off at the edge.
‘You are both sons of whores,’ said Don Emmanuel bitterly. ‘This was my favourite machete.’
Don Emmanuel refused to be defeated. He walked beside Aurelio pointing out suitable trees to fell, and Aurelio was saying, ‘No, that is a rubber tree; it would be a waste. No, that is a brazil nut tree; it would be a waste. No, that is a sacred tree; it would offend Pachacamac.’
‘I give up,’ said Don Emmanuel. ‘Even though the animals are leaving piles of dung that even a blindman could follow.’
‘Try this one,’ said Pedro. ‘But do not even start cutting it until everyone is past.’
Don Emmanuel felled the balsa tree in a couple of minutes, and returned to the column with his honour satisfied.
Steadily they mounted the slopes of the escarpment, a long high hump of land that protruded at a height of three hundred metres far out into the jungle. At the top the people and the cats and the other animals sat in the sunshine drawing breath and revelling in the cool wind and fresher air. Below them they saw the thin strip of jungle between the mountains and the savannah, and to the north the vast jungle, waving and green, that spread over the horizon. To their left arose the mountains, inviting but awesome, and to their right was discernible through binoculars the abandoned pueblo, abandoned Chiriguana, and the thin strip of the glistening Mula. The people looked back with nostalgia and regret upon the land of their birth, their labour, and their fiestas, and everyone was thinking, ‘One day we will return.’
The party was just picking itself up from the grass of the escarpment when the reason for the recent febrility of the cats and the whimsical obstreperousness of the pack-animals suddenly became very clear. There was a distant rumble and the earth began to shake beneath their feet, quivering from side to side like some vast lump of guava jelly. The people and the animals were thrown to their knees or onto their backs, and the cats leapt into their arms and clung on for salvation. The two thousand knelt, rocking with the tremors and with the terror, all reciting the litany of their sins at once, so that Father Garcia had to hear all of them simultaneously and grant mass-absolution amidst the rumbling and the babbling. Garcia calculated that the earthquake lasted for the exact duration of two Ave Marias and a Tota Pulchra Est.
The earthquake ended with gentle belches and gurgles in the entrails of the earth and the people, still crossing themselves, invoking angels and spirits, rose unsteadily to their feet. They looked out across the landscape and saw that their former homes were immersed in a shimmering and swirling sea of brilliant silver, for the sunshine was sparkling off the pale white dust raised by the vibrations of the earthquake. They did not know it, but their homes beneath the dust remained perfectly intact. ‘Ay! Ay! Ay!’ exclaimed the pilgrims, overcome with awe, and transfixed with the beauty of the sparkling sea on the plain. They had stood there a long time, watching the ocean of dust gently settling, when they heard a new sound of roaring and rushing. A kilometre away, above the valley in which they had formerly been travelling, a stupendous wall of water a hundred metres high suddenly burst between the cleft of two mountains and travelled in a vast arc before crashing on to the jungle below and tearing it to matchsticks as it hurled apocalyptically down the Mula basin in an advance of majestic and godlike inexorability, throwing a mist of spray high into the air and roaring like herds of herculean bulls engaged in inconceivable prehistoric struggles.
Dumbstruck, the crowd stood and bore witness as the mighty spout of foaming and glistening water continued to dive unendingly from between the mountains. They watched the plain turn into a featureless muddy sea, glistening brightly and ever-spreading on to the horizons. Very gradually the colossal spout began to diminish, until two hours later it was a waterfall cascading into a lake.
Without many words the people made camp on the escarpment. As evening fell they walked around each others’ encampments, holding cats in their arms for comfort, and those who had wronged each other in the past and bore grudges apologised and embraced. Old friends shook hands, and people who had never talked in the past exchanged confidences. Such things are caused not by fear but by the revelation that there is nothing stable in the whole universe and that everything is finally a matter of chance, which can so suddenly throw the life of men into chaos. People find their protection withdrawn, and this cuts wounds in the hearts of those who never before have felt helpless and small, and shows to them how precious is everything temporary and mundane. In the presence of such momentous force, such indifferent callousness, such mindless and irresistible cataclysm, one knows with absolute knowledge what it is to be an ant inside an anthill when it is trodden on by the foot of a thoughtless man.
The vehicles at the front of the column of invaders found themselves driving into a rapidly rising flood. The whole column was halted and the Major General of the Portachuelo Guards came forward and surveyed the scene from the top of one of the lorries. ‘I have seen this sort of thing before,’ said the Major General. ‘That tremor shook something loose in the mountains and this is the result. We will have to turn about.’
With great difficulty the vehicles manoeuvred back and forth in the encroaching mud until it was finally possible to return to Valledupar in advance of the water, which came to within fifty kilometres of the town and then gently receded.
The Government declared no national emergency, and no rescue operations were attempted. As far as they were concerned, the revolution was justly buried and forgotten.
On the top of the escarpment, Pedro turned to Aurelio, ‘Is Carmen under that?’
‘No,’ said Aurelio. ‘We live on that high ground over there on the other side. It is untouched. She will believe that I am dead, but when I return she will find that I am not.’
Pedro gazed out over the enormous lake that was now placid beneath the moonlight, and tickled the ears of the cat that was rubbing his cheek with its own.
‘We were lucky to escape from that.’
‘You were lucky I was here to listen to the animals,’ replied Aurelio impatiently.
Josef came up behind them and stood with them a moment, ‘Think of all the money I have wasted,’ he said, ‘paying Don Ramon for a proper burial and the three masses.’
‘Do not concern yourself,’ replied Pedro. ‘I think Father Garcia would do it for nothing, so you would still get a burial and three masses having paid out for exactly a burial and three masses.’
Josef nodded and absorbed the logic of Pedro’s words.
‘All the same,’ added Pedro. ‘You would do more good in the world by being fed to my dogs, eh cabron?’
33
* * *
THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE AND THE INCARAMA PARK
IT SOMETIMES HAPPENS that in relatively powerless and impoverished countries there arise men of enormous vision who are frustrated and offended by the limitations of their lives, and seek to reach out for the stars on behalf of themselves and their nations. It is as if they wished to cry out from the mountain tops, ‘Behold! How mighty are our dreams
! Look on at the birth of Greatness!’ It also may happen that two such men arise at the same time, and when this happens the world must look on in awe. In our case the two men were the Economics Minister, Dr Jorge Badajoz, and the Mayor of the capital, Raoul Buenanoce, whose activities, although not directly connected, ran curiously parallel.
It was just beginning to be possible for the President to feel a little more optimistic about the economy; the urban guerrillas had seemingly miraculously disappeared. He had heard the rumours about their secret extermination by the Armed Forces, but was relieved that now every bridge he opened was not blown up the day after the opening, and that power cuts were caused nowadays not by bombs but by good old-fashioned incompetence. He was also pleased that so many Trade Union leaders had vanished inexplicably, during the recent general strike, as their successors were more moderate in their demands for higher wages to offset the two hundred per cent rate of inflation. He had inaugurated campaigns of hundreds of arrests against strikers for breach of the peace and obstruction, and General Ramirez had very kindly sent a large number of plain-clothes soldiers among any groups of strikers to incite them to violence. As soon as this happened, the police would arrive with their batons and water cannon, and would release clouds of vomit gas, which caused the strikers to spew violently at the same time as being drenched and beaten over the head. The workers, having experienced the hell of flailing around on the ground in a rank lake of vomit became understandably more content with their steadily falling standard of living, and industrial harmony was largely restored.
The rural guerrillas in the mountains and jungle were not a problem as far as the President was concerned. He never went into the interior himself, did not want to, and did not care what all those dirty and illiterate peasants got up to as long as they stayed out of the capital. The ones who did arrive and set up home in shanty towns and favelas he discouraged by ordering the city police to burn down their cardboard shacks, load the peasants into lorries, and offload them as far away as possible in the countryside.
Now that economic progress was possible, the President appointed Dr Badajoz to perform the miracle. He was the chairman of the State Oil Company, and was also in the chair of the Free Trade Council. He had extensive contacts in the world of international banking, and having been educated at Eton, was a snob and an Anglophile. He had taken his degree in economics at Harvard, and had been completely converted to Friedmanite monetarism, in the belief that market forces can cause prices and inflation to stabilise in an atmosphere of competition.
Dr Badajoz came to office and inspected the state of the economy on his first day: there was an external debt of fifteen billion dollars, a balance of payments deficit of five billion dollars, almost no reserves of foreign currency, and the growth rate was actually in negative figures and was being called the ‘shrink rate’. He found that the government for fifteen years had had a policy of nationalising all failing industries, and now the state employed nearly half of all urban workers. He also found that in the past the state had passed formidably protectionist measures against imports, thus helping to keep in business a great many inefficient companies. Dr Badajoz decided to sell off the state industries, and to remove the prohibitive import tariffs, but was forbidden to create unemployment by the President, who believed that the unemployed would all become terrorists. Dr Badajoz realised very quickly that it was not going to be as simple as he had thought; the only way out was to gamble on being able to squeeze living standards and increase productivity at the same time, so as to keep everybody employed on increasingly worthless wages.
Dr Badajoz boldly allowed prices to rise to their natural level on the free market, so that tobacco doubled in price instantly, and petrol rose by forty per cent. Soon prices on everything were rising by half each month, and he found that he was creating the inflation he had come into office to defeat; so he froze all wages and effectively reduced the buying power of all wage-packets to less than half of what it had been before he assumed office.
Dr Badajoz found he could not raise the country’s income through taxation; no one except state employees had ever paid any taxes, and now that he was denationalising, there was even less tax coming in than before. Everyone other than state employees used to bribe the tax-officials not to tax them, and in any case nearly all business was transacted in illegal US dollars, whose blackmarket value was even quoted daily in the newspapers.
Some years previously the government had introduced index-linked stocks and bonds, and people used to use their wages to buy them in order to offset the effects of inflation; they would only cash them in order to go shopping when they could not resort to barter. No one used cheques any more because in the three days they took to clear they lost a lot of their value.
Dr Badajoz decided to place his faith in oil, coffee, and tropical fruit, the traditional basis of the economy, and began to campaign to give big incentives to agricultural concerns whilst the de-control of imports forced manufacturing industry to become more competitive. In this way the country was completely de-industrialised as cheap foreign goods replaced local ones and foreign capital moved in to asset-strip the abandoned industrial base.
Having observed all these unanticipated effects, Dr Badajoz decided to stabilise the currency by attracting foreign investment, so he freed interest rates and set the official value of the peso at two hundred to the dollar (when it was really four hundred) to reduce inflation, but turned a blind eye to those who were trading at the real rate. When he realised that his father, one of the richest men in Latin America, was about to die, he carried his non-interventionist credo to its logical conclusion, and abolished death duties.
The great economist’s best asset was his credibility amongst the major figures of world banking. It may have been his lean, cadaverous seriousness, his precise English, his Savile Row suits and his air of aristocratic savoir-faire, but whatever it was, he got everything he wanted out of the foreign banks. He raised six hundred million dollars from a group of American banks, he raised three hundred million from European banks, and three hundred million from the IMF on easy repayment terms. He even opened a branch of the National Bank in Paris.
It was so easy for him because the dramatic drop in the standard of living and the flood of cheap imports had halved inflation to one hundred per cent, and the increased internal competition had raised the rate of growth to five per cent. A good coffee harvest put both the balance of payments and the foreign reserves healthily into the black.
Had he been as wise as his reputation suggested, he should have retired at that point so that someone else could reap the whirlwind; but, believing that all was under control, he foolishly carried on. The President still forbade him to create unemployment by his denationalisation programme; but the foreign corporations who bought the industries were not interested in running them; they merely took away all the machinery to their own countries, leaving armies of unemployed. Badajoz had to re-employ them, even though he had nothing for them to do, so that the number of state employees remained the same as before and the state’s share in the nation’s spending began rapidly to rise.
The Doctor also found that there was a major sector of the economy which he could not control, and the President even refused to tell him how large it was. ‘It would only upset you,’ he had said, ‘and I cannot bear to think about it myself.’ Badajoz realised he would never get inflation defeated as long as the Armed Forces spent whatever they wanted. They had their own chemical, shipbuilding, textiles, steel and aircraft factories, and they spent vast sums abroad on German tanks, American fighters, British radar, French helicopters, and missiles from wherever they could be had. Additionally, they would not let the Economics Minister veto the purchase of six airliners by the national airline, on the grounds that they would be useful in the event of war. They were supposed to be used on new routes to Japan and Singapore, but no one ever went there, and the aircraft remained idle. Badajoz also discovered that it was customary amongst businesses to
pay the military up to five per cent of any deal as ‘goodwill’ money; and he could not stop the Navy from investing heavily in nuclear research and hydroelectric plant. In short, as the economic situation in the country improved, the military saw its chance of demanding ever greater sums of money.
It seemed as though everything happened at once; the tractor and car industry, which consisted of five large companies, collapsed in the space of one month because of cheaper imports and the over-valued peso. The new agricultural revolution, which had been meant to save the economy, had to proceed on foreign machinery. Dr Badajoz had freed interest rates to prevent dollar speculation, and suddenly they went higher than the rate of inflation so that all the farmers went bankrupt and nobody would invest in anything any more. People sold all their assets and speculated instead on the financial markets. Foreign capital poured into the economy to take advantage of the new interest rates, and one month later poured out again, taking the government’s money with it in the form of interest payments. Three banks collapsed and went into liquidation because they could not call in debts; if they had done, the ownership of the indebted factories and farms would have come into their hands, with no chance of ever making a profit from them.
Successful speculators on the wildly fluctuating financial markets went abroad on lavish holidays and spent $41,000,000,000 over two years, mostly in the United States, because the peso was still officially overvalued against the dollar, thus making dollars cheap. For the same reason imports increased by fifty-five per cent in one year.
After three years of the economic miracle, Dr Jorge Badajoz took stock of the following information in his ministry’s annual report: since he had come to office ninety per cent of credit and currency were in the hands of the state, living standards had dropped by fifty per cent and so had manufacturing output. The foreign debt was $60,000,000, and inflation had doubled to four hundred per cent. The Treasury had printed the first ever million peso note. Dr Badajoz sold everything he had, and, bitter, disillusioned and sad, disappeared suddenly with trunk-fuls of dollars, and was next heard of living in Uruguay.