Her mama, who had been forced to watch all of this, and who had been the one screaming, was the next to suffer. The guerrilleros ripped from her womb the foetus that was to have been another brother for Remedios, and replaced it with a cockerel. Then they set about the complex operation of ‘bocachiquiar’, a kind of exaggerated acupuncture which involved covering the body with thousands of tiny holes so that the victim seeped very slowly to death.
Remedios tried to take care of her brother, Alfredo, and they became orphans of the gutter, living off banana skins, licking sweet wrappers, chewing discarded bones left by the dogs, and stealing fruit from the few chinganas and tiendas that were still operating and which nowadays mostly stocked only the cheapest alcohol.
Remedios was taken in by the Sisters of the Montfortian Mission, and Alfredo by the Brothers of the Divine Will, and from then on she hardly ever saw him, as the two missions were rivals in a dispute over a rich bequest from a pious latifundista’s widow.
Remedios was at the convent until the age of sixteen, during which time her loathing of religion reached such heights that the nuns unwittingly exacerbated it by having her exorcised. She emerged from having her head shaken and squeezed by the sweating and chanting priest convinced that she had to spend her life fighting in the cause of sanity. She left the convent having imbibed only the nuns’ fanaticism and their morbid frigidity.
Upon leaving, she discovered that she also hated the Liberal-Conservative coalition, which was now called the National Front. She did not know who had killed her parents, or which way her parents used to vote, so she divided her hatred of the two parties impartially, and blamed them equally. It was this that caused her to choose the only remaining alternative, the Communists. The Communists had two major attractions for Remedios; one was a utopian vision of the future, and the other was a very clear idea of who was the enemy – everyone who was not in the Party, and who must therefore be a part of the gigantic conspiracy to oppress the masses.
Remedios worked very hard to persuade the masses to become class-conscious and to organise, but became disillusioned when she realised that they preferred to be disorganised, did not consider themselves to be part of the masses (‘My grandfather was a Capitan’) and continued to vote Liberal and Conservative, if they voted at all, which eighty per cent did not.
Remedios tried to reach the eighty per cent of the non-aligned, but every new organisation formed to align them eventually turned into its own party which would not align with any of the others, especially the Communists, who immodestly believed that being non-aligned meant being aligned with themselves.
The proliferation of squabbles and pompous pronunciamentos of the luminaries of the left forced Remedios to realise that there was never any hope of success by democratic means, as a vote to one faction of the divided left was a vote lost in the fight against the National Front coalition. At the age of twenty-two she travelled to the Independent Republic of the 26th of September, and joined their armed force of guerrillas, disappearing into the hills with one of its factions when the National Army invaded in order to liberate the republic and to bring it back into the fold.
Remedios was by now a strong character. She radiated firmness of purpose, unshakeableness of vision, moral and physical courage, and a tender sadness that made all her companeros love her. She was well-built and shapely, with black hair tied back in a ponytail, and she had a kind of beauty that was half Indian and half Hispanic, even though her father had been a Negro. ‘Somewhere there’s a bit of conquistador in your blood,’ her mother used to say. ‘I hope it never comes out in your character.’
Remedios, for all her generous heart and gifts of nature, had never been in love, and no one had ever been in love with her. She was without sexuality, but all the poor people of the earth were her family, and she had seen the pistacos with her own eyes of a child.
6
* * *
THE GENERAL PLANS HIS LEAVE
HE WAS CALLED Carlo after his Italian grandfather and he was the finest possible kind of soldier; that is to say he was not at all interested in swaggering about intimidating people, in social climbing, in glamorous warmongering, or in genuine Scotch whisky. He was on the contrary a sensitive and intelligent man of broad education and many interests, which is why the military authorities treated him with enough suspicion to send him to Cesar, and also why the civil authorities were so obstructive when he got there. A man of integrity in high office was a rara avis that could very easily disrupt the smooth operation of corruption and incompetence even more than a man of arbitrary megalomania or extreme violence. He caused enormous resentment on his second day of office by jailing the police chief for the rape of a mestiza woman, and doubling the sentence when the guilty man courteously and discreetly offered him a large bribe according to time-honoured custom and practice. Everyone thought he was mad or, even worse, a Communist when he publicly denounced the city police chief. The police force spontaneously came out on strike. Nobody noticed the difference, and the strike was in any case rapidly ended when the lepidopterological General threatened a thorough investigation into the record of every single policeman in the department.
General Carlo Maria Fuerte had to his credit an anthology of respectable verse on patriotic themes, and the most complete work on the nation’s butterflies that had ever been compiled. Since his country was the world’s foremost producer of those cardboard books with pictures that can be moved by pulling tags, his book incorporated a life-size representation of the calicos butterfly that looked like an owl. It could be made to flap its wings and move its antennae. It was a great mortification to him that this splendid and compendious work had been bought by practically every important library in the world, but not a single copy had sold in his own country. He attributed this to lack of patriotism, not realising that comparatively few people could read, that even if they could, they could not have afforded the book, and if they could both read and afford it, then they were the kind of people who would have got their servants to squash any butterfly that came near them. He was now compiling a work on the nation’s humming-birds, meticulously illustrated in oils done with the help of his own photographs, and was unaware that he had discovered three species hitherto undocumented. Like his butterfly project, his Picaflores de la Cordillera y La Sierra Nevada was motivated by patriotism.
There are two types of patriotism, although sometimes the two are mingled in one breast. The first kind one might call nationalism; nationalists believe that all other countries are inferior in every respect, and one would do them a favour by dominating them. Other countries are always in the wrong, they are less free, less civilised, are less glorious in battle, are perfidious, prone to falling for insane and alien ideologies which no reasonable person could believe, are irreligious and abnormal. Such patriots are the most common variety, and their patriotism is the most contemptible thing on earth.
The second type of patriot is best described by returning to the example of General Fuerte. General Fuerte did not believe in ‘my country, right or wrong’; on the contrary, he loved his land despite the faults he could so clearly see and that he laboured to correct. It was his frequently stated opinion that anyone who supported their country when it was obviously in the wrong, or who failed to see its faults, was the worst kind of traitor. Whereas the first kind of patriot really glories in his own irrationality and not in his country, General Carlo Maria loved his country as a son loves his mother or a brother his sister.
He loved the Amazonas, with its impenetrable cascades of the lushest green vegetation, its enormous trees, its poisonous yellow frogs and giant snakes; its tigres, its crazy-faced monkeys, its aborigines who still went naked and hunted with blow-pipes and poisoned darts. He loved the Caribbean sea with its lugubrious fish and its million shades of aqua blue, its shimmering white and yellow sands. He loved the ancient Spanish towns upon its coast, the huge semi-wild pigs that dug themselves hollows and slept all day beneath the palms, the fishermen’s wive
s who would stare out to sea at dusk watching for their returning husbands and fearing sharks on their behalf. He loved the Pacific coast which rose almost immediately into spectacular mountains, and he shared the national grief with every earthquake and tidal wave that beat this shore into desolation and terror at times of the full moon, just as he shared the national pride in his countrymen’s abilities to fight back to normal thereafter, when even thieves did no looting and hardened rapists helped distressed women find their children in the cataclysm of mud and debris.
Unlike almost all his countrymen, the General even loved the savannah, whose heat in the dry season would bleach the bones of the living and split the red rocks into shards with a report like that of a howitzer, and whose humidity in the wet season would drive people to sit all day up to their necks in rivers like Japanese monkeys in order to cool the body of sweat and evade the mosquitoes whose relentless envenomed probings could turn so easily into ulcers. The General would walk about these deserts of reptiles and heroic desiccated grasses peering up into the stumps of trees hollowed by lightning in order to see the swarms of inverted vampire bats which at night settled on the necks and rumps of horses and mules, and spread rabies more effectively than dogs. He would beat against the walls of the trees with his military cane and guess by the light of a match how many of the twittering and squeaking creatures there must be whirling and wheeling in that unnatural darkness, dropping excrement of pure blood.
He loved too the moon so large and resplendent that one can see all the seas and pockmarks without the aid of an instrument. In Europe he had been so contemptuous of their moon’s insignificance and lack of splendour that that, above anything else, had made him long to return home where one sees as clearly but more magically by night as by day. In Europe he had pitied the thunder and lightning, for at home the thunder cracks as though from inside one’s own head like the gun of a tank, and reverberates inside it until the plates of the skull seem to shiver apart at the seams. At home the lightning is brighter than the flame of magnesium, and freezes the world into tableaux like a randomly-set stroboscope; it fells huge trees before one’s very eyes, and splits apart to dance at the tips of mountains.
And it was the mountains that General Fuerte loved the most, for as one proceeds through the altitudes, the climate and the life change through three distinct stages. For the first seven thousand feet it is the Garden of Eden, a luxuriance of orchids, humming-birds, and tiny streams of delicious water that run by miracle alongside every path. Above this height for three or four thousand feet is a world of rock and water draped like hanging gardens with alien, lunar plants in shades of brown and red and yellow with a habit so curious and enchanted as to be found in books of legend and romance. Above this is the Venusian world of ice, of sudden reckless mists of palpable water, of lichen and trickling springs, of fragmenting shale and glistening white peaks, where human realities become remote and ridiculous, where the sky is actually below you and inside you, where breathing is an accomplishment in itself, and where condors, inconceivably ponderous and gigantic, wheel on the upcurrents like lords of a different and fantastic universe. It is here that the Incas trap them; they know that a condor needs more space to take off than to land, and so they place a carcass in a small corral and wait. The feathers they use for robes and of the hollow thigh bones they make that eerie flute, the quena. The Incas rightly kill anyone who shoots a condor for ‘sport’ or curiosity or vainglory, and they leave the corpse for the condors and the lesser vultures.
Unlike nearly all patriots, the General also loved the people. It filled him with awe to see the sculpted bodies of the campesinos with their Greek muscles and the veins etched in relief beneath their black skins like maps of rivers. He felt a mysterious and mystical pride in the unapproachable Incas and their ruined civilisation, and always reflected that once, after all, his countrymen had fought indefatigable and undaunted with Simon Bolivar to unite the countries of the North West, including Panama, and to throw out the Spanish with all their corrupting hubris and incomprehensible cruelty. He longed, like a man born out of time, for the return of such a fiery and magnificent spirit in the people, who were now as venial as their ancestors had been indomitable.
The General also loved the Army, which to him was like a wife; that is to say he was frequently at odds with it, he found it tiresome and sometimes boring. He was often obliged to attend to details that he thought were unimportant, and he was often tempted to leave. However, it gave him order, stability, direction and purpose; he liked to have to stick to regulations because it saved him from having to agonise over decisions, and like most of the finest officers he conceived of the Army not as a means to war but as an instrument of stability and peace. He had never contemplated participating in a coup, and had only seen battle once, in a futile and piffling little war over a patch of territory that was no use to anyone, and so he had as far as possible avoided putting his men in danger, and never wished to do so again. When he thought of the Army he thought of it indeed as a man thinks of a fine wife of many years, not with passion, but with swelling pride and affection that warms the heart and proves that contentment is more to be desired than happiness.
So much for what the General loved; what he loathed was Communism, which to him was a word so broad and hazy of definition that one might describe it as meaningless. That is, to him a Communist was anyone who wished to rock the boat so much that people fell out of it or got splashed. To a peace-loving and contented man, who loved his country and found life to be unfailingly interesting, random assassinations and economic sabotage seemed both brutal and stupid. ‘Why,’ he would ask, ‘if they are for the people, do they blow up bridges and railways built for the benefit of the people? Why do they slaughter their patrones so that all the fincas go to ruin through mismanagement? Why do they not work for change from within, rather than try to impose it from without, by violence?’
The problem, of course, was twofold. One was that like even the guerrillas themselves, the General knew next to nothing of what the theory of Communism was. It did not worry him that the ideology was atheist for example, because he had no sympathy for the church himself, and it did not worry the guerrillas either, who still prayed to the angels before battle and asked spirits for advice on tactics. It did not worry him that the guerrillas wanted land-reform, because he thought that that would be a good thing. What worried and angered him was that his soldiers were being shot at by ruffians with foreign weapons and bushy beards, who spoke only in slogans.
He also knew that Communism was the opposite of the American system, and it was the American system that he wanted for his country; good highways, a good diet, a car for everyone, new hospitals, political stability. He had been to the USA and found the people decent, honourable and hospitable, and he therefore dismissed as irritatingly crass propaganda all the stories he had heard about CIA shenanigans, about the way that for every two pesos lent three pesos went out as interest, about US corporations sucking out the resources of the country. It did not seem to him at all credible.
What he did believe, however, was what he read in the newspapers, what he heard from high-ranking officers, government ministers and his acquaintances among the US military about what slavery the Communists wished to impose upon the free world. And why should he not believe this? No one had ever given him any reasons to believe otherwise, and this leads us on to the second half of our twofold problem.
This was, that being a general removed him as a matter of course from the front line; that is, he had no reason not to believe in the literal truth of reports sent in by people such as Capitan Rodrigo Figueras. As far as he was concerned there was no evidence that such men were not strictly honourable and competent, and even if there were any evidence he always had to consider the possibility that it was Communist propaganda. He had been told that the Communists frequently murdered the peasants in order to blame it on the military. Additionally, coming as he did from a respectable family in Cucuta, he had seen the pove
rty and humiliation of others with his own eyes but never with his heart, as he had never experienced them himself. Consequently, he had no clear idea of the very personal reasons that guerrillas came up with for taking up arms.
Neither, as it happens, did the few Cuban agitators and military experts who had slipped into the country to infiltrate the labour movement and the bands of guerrillas. They came over with their heads full of ideals and theories about armed propaganda, the dictatorship of the proletariat, jungle tactics and the opiate of the masses, only to be baffled, amazed and disgusted by the guerrillas’ superstitions, unclarity of purpose, habit of going home for harvests and fiestas, inability (or rather, refusal) to organise, lack of interest in theory of any kind, and their odd reasons for fighting (the patron would not lend me fifty pesos, the patron shot my dog, in Venezuela they are paid better, I want to be able to go to France and they will not give me a passport because I have no birth certificate which means I have not yet been born and I want the right to be born). Most often, however, the guerrillas were fighting because some were too rich and everyone else too poor, and because they had become victims in some way of the Army’s random hooliganism. It was enough for them to know what they were fighting against; they did not need advice about what they were fighting for, or how to set about it.
General Carlo Maria Fuerte did at least know what he was fighting for, but today he was planning his leave, a very easy matter for him since he was in charge of all dispensations in the area. He was going to take a donkey, his military pack full of provisions, his service revolver for protection, his binoculars and his camera, to look for humming-birds in the Sierra. In his pocket, to put himself in the right mood, was a copy of Hudson’s Idle Days in Patagonia.