El Gandul’s assembled fragments were transported under military guard to the Presidential Palace and the coffin was placed on a podium in the entrance so that people could call in to pay their respects. His Excellency announced that there would be four days’ lying-in-state, that there would be a state funeral in the ornate Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, and that he would personally stand watch over the coffin on the first night.
The events that ensued, tragic, duplicitous, and vicious as they were, assumed the proportions of an heroic farce which stretch credence to the limit and bear witness to the manner in which wickedness is invariably repaid in its own coin.
President Veracruz stood his watch over the coffin by having a bed brought down into the hall. At three o’clock in the morning he turned off his alarm clock and let in the four men at the entrance of the kitchens who were carrying a substitute coffin filled to the correct weight with bags of nails. The men from the Service of State Information packed some of the President’s new alchemical explosive into the coffin and rigged up a powerful remote pistol-grip detonation device which they handed to the President. Carefully he locked it into the safe in his office, and the four men left by the kitchen entrance carrying the remains of El Gandul in the original coffin. They drove the truck to the paupers’ cemetery and left the coffin at the end of the line of those waiting in the open air to be buried. In the morning the sexton counted the coffins twice, realised that he had one too many, and to save delays and complications buried the last one under ‘Non-nombre’, which for once was the truth.
That evening it was the turn of Admiral Fleta to stand watch over the coffin. He dozed in an armchair until half past two, when he went and unbolted the door of the tradesmen’s entrance to let in the five men who were carrying a substitute coffin containing bags of ball-bearings and two timed limpet mines. The men of the Naval Internal Intelligence Agency left with the other coffin and delivered it to the back entrance of Admiral Fleta’s mansion in the suburbs; getting rid of such a hot property was not something he intended to entrust to anyone else.
The following evening was the turn of Air Chief Marshal Sanchis. He slept in snatches on a folded-out double divan until one o’clock in the morning, when he went and unbolted the doors of the service entrance and let in two giggling call-girls of indeterminate vintage who helped him to pass the time until half-past three, when he sent them away and let in the five men carrying a substitute coffin packed with bags of nuts and bolts and containing two time-fused flechette anti-personnel bombs. The men of the Air Force Internal Security Agency then left with the other coffin and delivered it to the side entrance of Air Chief Marshal Sanchis’ house in the suburbs, where it was left in the cellar for disposal at a more convenient date.
On the last of the nights of the vigil, General Ramirez paced up and down the hall chain-smoking, chewing his fingernails, and going to the lavatory every ten minutes. At three o’clock in the morning he went to the service doors and unbolted them to let in the four men of the Army Internal Security Service who were bringing a substitute coffin filled with fragmentation grenades and two timed directional claymore mines. The four men heaved the other coffin on to their shoulders and bore it out to the truck, which they drove to General Ramirez’ estate and left in his garage.
All this bears witness not so much to the wave-like motion of coincidence, nor to the inscrutable machinations of synchronicity, but to the unified and stereotypical manner in which the military plots when engaged in illicit political manoeuvring.
On the morning of the state funeral General Ramirez telephoned the President’s office to say that a recurrence of back trouble prevented him from doing his duty as a pallbearer, and that he had reluctantly delegated the honourable task to one of his deputies. Admiral Fleta rang in to say that his beloved mother was on her deathbed, therefore he could not do his duty as a pall-bearer, and had delegated the task to a commander. He forebore to mention that the commander was a troublesome nationalist left-winger who had once started a mutiny at the Maracay Naval Base, but who had been amnestied by President Veracruz. Air Chief Marshal Sanchis telephoned to say that the ‘paludismo’ he had contracted in the Montana during his secondment to the Peruvian Air Force had once more laid him low, and that he had reluctantly delegated his duties as pall-bearer to Flight-Lieutenant Rosario Uceda (a man on his staff whom he secretly suspected of being in the pay of General Ramirez).
The President was exasperated by this frustration of his plans to do away with the Chiefs of Staff, and when it was announced over the radio that none of the Chiefs of Staff would be present as pall-bearer, the latter were equally exasperated at the frustration of their plans to do away with each other.
Nonetheless, each was privately excited about the forthcoming explosion, and President Veracruz suddenly realised that the public was bound to blame the absent Chiefs of Staff for it. It would be stretching coincidence too far for them to be able to explain their unanimous absence in any other way. For reasons of political expediency he reversed his decision not to blow up the innocent pall-bearers. He resolved to do it as the coffin was being borne up the many steps of the Cathedral because then there would be no one else in close proximity to the explosion.
Fortunately for almost everyone, nothing went according to plan. The organisational chaos of the morning delayed everything very considerably. The Guard of Honour was unable to form up on time because the soldiers from Ecuador and Colombia who were to take part in it were late, owing to fog at the airport, so that just as the service was supposed to take place and Ramirez’ bomb was due to explode, the cortege had still not moved off from the Presidential Palace. The Colombian Hussars and Ecuadorian Dragoons turned up at last, and then the axle of the ancient gun-carriage broke, so that the coffin was removed to an ante-room whilst another gun-carriage was fetched and hastily smartened up.
In the empty ante-room the claymore mines of General Ramirez exploded with a crash. The weak outer walls of the room descended in slow motion and with dignity amid a swirl of dust and rubble on to the swept gravel of the courtyard. Covered in white dust, the Guard of Honour ran around in confusion, and Ramirez, who was listening on the radio as he drove, cast his eyes to the heavens.
The President, quite sure that he had not inadvertently pressed the button on his remote detonation device, hastily put his hand in his pocket to check that the safety switch had not moved.
Admiral Fleta was in his living room listening to the excited commentary of the announcer with the radio perched on top of the coffin containing the alchemical explosive. The President fiddled with the controls of his apparently self-willed detonation device, and the disingenuous Admiral was obliterated by a blast that consumed him and his armchair, but stopped abruptly at a radius of two metres from the epicentre, leaving the rest of the room untouched.
Air Chief Marshal Sanchis was just pushing the coffin containing Fleta’s limpet mines out of the ancient Dakota when it exploded, tearing a huge hole in the floor of the fuselage and sending him and the remains of the coffin plummeting one thousand metres into the jungle below. When the Cusicuari found the shattered body they shrank it, set it up on a pole and venerated it as yet another angel whose wings had inexplicably fallen off. The Dakota managed to fly back to base despite having almost no shell left stretched over its central ribbing. The pilot, faced with the intractable problem of how to report what had happened without implicating himself in Sanchis’ nefarious plot, reported that he had been fired on with ground-to-air missiles during a routine flight. He did not mention that Air Chief Marshal Sanchis had been on board, nor did he mention anything about exploding coffins.
General Ramirez was at the same time in the empty Ex-Officers’ Wing of the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He had pulled the coffin out of the truck on to a trolley and had wheeled it into the crematorium. He was just pumping the trolley up to the right height to be able to push the coffin containing the flechette bombs of Air
Chief Marshal Sanchis into the oven when they detonated cataclysmically and sent the steel arrows ricocheting and whining about the confined space. General Ramirez was already in shreds and fragments when the huge fuel tanks were pierced. They combusted with a throaty roar that lifted the roof, blew out the walls, and incendiarised the entire school.
Meanwhile the huge crowds lining the route of the funeral became bored with waiting and melted away to take advantage of the week of national mourning. The dignitaries in the Cathedral waited two hours more, then began to make their excuses to each other and leave. The soldiers were taken by their commanders back to their barracks, and the Ecuadorian Dragoons and the Colombian Hussars were apologetically shown the sights of the city by an embarrassed presidential aide who finally abandoned them at three o’clock in the morning in a notorious puteria on the Calle de San Isidro.
The newspapers the following week seemed to consist almost entirely of headlines: ‘Body of General Explodes’, ‘Army School Inexplicably Burnt Down’, ‘Foreign Soldiers in Violent Incident in Brothel’, ‘Admiral Fleta Spontaneously Combusts’, ‘President To Address Nation’.
In the interim, the occasion for all these dramatic events had arrived safely with his friend Papagato and the five cats in the township of Chiriguana, which was half a metre deep in dried mud and populated solely by margays, pumas and ocelots. They had wandered for two months on the buried Mula basin, before deciding to follow the cats, who seemed to have definite ideas about where to go. They eventually arrived in Cochadebajo de los Gatos just in time to hear the end of Father Garcia’s sermon to the cats and to watch him, in a state of epiphany, levitate down from the obelisk, at the base of which he was later to carve the famous words ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’.
43
* * *
GIFTS OF LIFE
CARMEN LEAPT OUT of her hammock and shook Aurelio awake. ‘I know my real name, querido, I dreamed it! It is “Matarau”!’
Aurelio opened his eyes. ‘You should not have told me that. It means I have power over you.’
Carmen laughed at him. ‘Husband, do you think you have no power over me already?’ She bent down and kissed his cheek. He smiled gravely. ‘Your power over me is as mine over you.’ He climbed out of the hammock and set about rekindling the fire with dried grass. Carmen watched him and asked, ‘Querido, what does it mean?’
He looked up. ‘It is Quechua,’ he said. ‘It means forehead of snow.’
‘That is a paradox,’ she said. ‘Here I am, black as night, and not a single grey hair!’
‘My name makes no sense either,’ replied Aurelio. ‘But it is still my name. You have to understand that some of the Gods have no more brains than a monkey, and play the same kinds of tricks.’
When he had eaten his breakfast of cassava and cancha, Aurelio went to cut himself a stick of quebracha. He sharpened it with great labour and difficulty because it was so hard, but to him it was worth it because then the stick would last a very long time. Then he filled his mochila with maize and went off to the clearing he had made with his machete. He sifted through his fingers the fine ash of the vegetation he had burned, and was satisfied that it was good and that soon it would rain. Methodically he made little holes with the stick, and tossed a seed into each hole, covering it again with his foot to give it a chance against the birds and the mice. When Carmen had finished making her arepas and feeding the chickens, she came out to join him, and they worked deftly and systematically side by side until the planting was done. Then they went to the little coca plantation and harvested enough leaves to make one tambo, the fifty-pound pack of compressed leaves that they would sell to the cocaleros when they arrived, or which Aurelio would carry to Cochadebajo de los Gatos as a present for the people there. From time to time Aurelio would glance sideways at Carmen, with her copper curls and her puro clenched between her teeth, and think about what it was to be with someone for such a long time and never tire of them, and what it was to grow old in the flesh but not in the spirit.
They stopped at midday to drink lemon juice sweetened with panela, and to eat the arepas, sitting side by side in the shade of a balsa tree without saying a word, but squinting at the brilliant light beyond the ring of shade. They were both asleep when they were startled to wakefulness by two explosions and a great commotion over at the mined path. Aurelio and Carmen crept through the trees to see what had happened.
Lieutenant Figueras had not volunteered for the job, but the politicians had decided that they had to give a little in the face of the pressure from the United States to destroy a few cocaine plantations, and the instructions had filtered down via the new commander, who considered it all a waste of time. For him it was natural to think of the one officer to whom he could give the unpleasant task, whose presence he would not miss in the least, and who was incapable of anything more exacting in military terms.
Figueras and his platoon had travelled through the deserted Mula basin, now reverting to scrub and jungle, and had found a path. With not the smallest idea of where he was going or what he was intending to do, he and his men hacked their way through the encroaching vegetation. They were sweating in rivers, and around their heads and arms hung clouds of stinging insects that tormented them to a point of insanity. In the twilight world of the jungle they were impaled by thorns, sank up to their knees in bog, and were horrified by the yellow whipper-snakes draped luxuriously from the branches. Huge spiders dropped from the ferns and clung on to their uniforms, and Parlanchina’s growls and whoops wholly unnerved them.
Figueras was with the same platoon that he had commanded before his meteoric rise and equally meteoric fall, and they despised him as much as he despised them. In a customary fit of braggadocio and pointless machismo, Figueras was in point position despite the rule that the officer should always be near the middle of an Indian-file patrol. He was fatter than before because he had swallowed his disgrace with the aid of heavy drinking, and he carried heavy bags beneath his piggy eyes from indulging in his ever less fastidious tastes in cheap whores, whose conquest he no longer marked on his jeep since the Brigadier had fined him for defacing army property without reasonable excuse.
Figueras did not step on the first two mines, nor the third. Instead he sprung the trap that Aurelio had laid so many months before. The fire-hardened spikes whipped up in an arc from beneath the leaves of the forest floor and thudded into his chest. Transfixed, his eyes bulging, he grasped the frame in his hands and tried to push it away against the barbs that wrenched in his heart and lungs. Blood gurgled and foamed in his mouth and he remembered for no reason the beginnings of his days of glory, when he had tossed a grenade spinning into a group of peasants who had prevented him from having a little fun. His last thought, as his legs gave way and he swung forward on the spikes, was, ‘Take the little whore to the schoolhouse and prepare her,’ and the last picture in his mind was of the two medals that once had hung gloriously on his full dress uniform, the Silver Andean Condor Medal for Gallantry, and the Gold. He died happily, imagining that he still had them, and that his life had been as he had always yearned for it to be, honourable, heroic, and full of beauty.
The other men had stood horrified whilst Figueras swayed on the trap. Then they had run forward to succour him and had been shredded by the mines, whilst one of their number, the Corporal, pitched headlong into one of the pits and was pierced cruelly by the poisoned stakes. He died crying and whimpering and thinking of his wife in Tolima who had left him for another man.
The rest of the soldiers had already run by the time Aurelio and Carmen arrived. Aurelio surveyed the carnage bitterly and blamed himself out loud. ‘I was so used to having to avoid this section of the path that I had forgotten about it.’
‘They were soldiers,’ said Carmen, trying to comfort him. ‘Their trade was not life, but death. They have eaten the fruit of the tree they grew for others to eat.’
‘The war was over,’ said Aurelio sadly.
‘People always die from wars that
are over.’
They left the bodies where they lay, and that night Aurelio’s dogs began to feast, until the great black jaguar growled and scared them so that they ran off whimpering. The velvet cat settled down and growled as it cut the flesh with its teeth, dimly recollecting this same taste somewhere in the past that was the perpetual present of its vision of its life. Then, satiated, it carried a limb off to its cubs, only one of whom was black, and would one day also be awesome and majestic.
In the morning Aurelio left Carmen sleeping as he took his tin tejilinas and set off along his rubber trail, his own troche. He had an estrada of thirty trees that yielded him enough rubber to earn some extra pesos and to use himself if he needed it. But often he wondered why he bothered with the rubber at all; it was not profitable, and had not been so in living memory.