Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Louis de Bernières
Dedication
Title Page
Author’s Note
1 Capitan Rodrigo Figueras’ finest hour
2 In which Dona Constanza Evans resolves to save the swimming pool from drought
3 In which Federico’s romantic gesture takes on wider implications
4 In which Sergio grapples with the problem of the canal
5 Remedios and the Pistacos
6 The General plans his leave
7 Don Emmanuel’s ineffective diplomacy and its consequences
8 Aurelio is disinherited
9 The tribulations of Federico
10 Comandante Figueras disrupts a fiesta
11 Aurelio’s education amongst the Navantes
12 Federico is taught to be a guerrilla and General Fuerte is captured
13 The only way to turn a campesino into a gunman
14 Parlanchina goes to her wedding
15 General Carlo Maria Fuerte is tried for crimes against civilisation
16 Dona Constanza receives an unwelcome surprise
17 A letter home
18 The People’s Liberation Force confounds the people’s vanguard and the national army in one stroke
19 In which Josef contemplates death, and plans are made
20 The innocents
21 How Dona Constanza falls in love for the first time and loses several kilos
22 In which Colonel Rodrigo Figueras forgets the first two principles of war and imperils his prospects
23 The unofficial monarchy of the catholic kings
24 Gloria and Constanza hatch a plot
25 The two virgins
26 The blossoming of Colonel Asado
27 Of cures, cats, and laughter
28 The battle of Chiriguana
29 Colonel Asado makes a little mistake
30 The return of Maria, and the return of the soldiers
31 The continuing efforts of Olaf Olsen, Colonel Asado, and his excellency, The President
32 Exodus
33 The economic miracle and the incarama park
34 General Fuerte enjoys the hospitality of the army internal security service
35 The President discovers the aphrodisiac properties of reducing the military
36 ¡De tu casa a la agena, sal con la barrigada llena!
37 Nemesis: General Fuerte calls in on the escuadron de la muerte
38 Days of wonders, days of debilitation
39 His excellency becomes an adept and begets a magical child
40 The threefold assassination of General Carlo Maria Fuerte
41 The beginning of the post-diluvian history of Cochadebajo de los Gatos
42 The obsequies of General Carlo Maria Fuerte
43 Gifts of life
Copyright
About the Author
Louis de Bernières is the best-selling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book in 1995.
His most recent novel is A Partisan’s Daughter.
ALSO BY LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World
Red Dog
Birds Without Wings
A Partisan’s Daughter
To the Incorrigible and Legendary
Don Benjamin of Poponte,
who entrusted me with
several children and three horses.
The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts
Louis de Bernières
Author’s Note
IN CREATING AN imaginary Latin American country, I have jumbled up and adapted incidents from many different countries at different times in their history. I have borrowed words and phrases from Brazilian Portuguese and its regional variants, Latin-American Spanish and its regional variants, and from many Indian languages and their dialects. In some of these latter there is, as far as I know, no standardised spelling. Since there is general anarchy in the use of accents, I have decided to dispense with them altogether.
I am indebted to many sources for my research, but I wish to acknowledge in particular my debt to Richard Gott’s Rural Guerrillas in Latin America (Pelican, 1973), and John Simpson and Jana Bennett’s The Disappeared (Robson Books, 1985). The political information in these books was invaluable.
I owe special thanks to Helen Wright, whose conscientious checking of the manuscript enabled me to eliminate a great many errors.
1
* * *
CAPITAN RODRIGO FIGUERAS’ FINEST HOUR
IT HAD BEEN an auspicious week for Capitan Rodrigo Jose Figueras. On Monday he had with his platoon stopped a truck loaded with marijuana on the road from Chiriguana to Valledupar and made the peasant park it near a bridge. According to the usual procedure he had confiscated the truck and its contents from the driver, whereupon the driver, as was usual, offered to ‘pay the fine’ instead, which meant buying the consignment back. He handed over to the Capitan one of several bundles which he carried for this purpose, one for each roadblock. The Capitan then shot the driver through the head and liberated entirely the truck, its contents, and many thousands of pesos. The Lieutenant began to write a brief report on the driver – ‘shot whilst resisting arrest’ – and sealed it in an envelope with the man’s identity card; meanwhile the Capitan took the truck and the jeep to the farm with the airstrip and sold the marijuana to the gringo with the aeroplane for many more thousands, then he sold the truck for next to nothing to a white farmer who could arrange the documents, and then he drove in the jeep back to his platoon’s encampment by the river. Liberally, he handed out a few thousand pesos each to the men, and at his own expense sent the Corporal to the village to buy a case of aguardiente and ron cana with orders to return also with a selection of whores from twelve to forty in several shapes and sizes so that all tastes could be catered for; consequently the village men had to go without for a week. The Capitan was thirty-five, with a wife and five children who lived in some style in Santa Marta in his absence. His hairy belly spread his shirt apart at the buttons, he was thick-lipped and leering-eyed, and his hair lay flat across his head by the weight of its own grease. He had been trained in Panama by the United States Army, at their own expense, and he painted a little white mark on the door of his jeep for every whore there had been.
Misael woke with the dawn as he always did, and threw dried maize stems on the embers to get them going again so that he could have strong coffee with his bocadillos for breakfast before he left with his machete for the day’s work. He was tall and grizzled, dark-eyed and cheerful, his body sculpted by the muscle of a life’s labour into a Greek ideal. It was the same with all the mestizo and mulatto peasants, for their bodies were all perfect in shape, strength and endurance; but their old age was not protracted, and hardship was a high price for beauty.
He checked his little boy, who had been terribly disfigured when he had sat in the fire as an infant, and decided not to wake him or his wife. Chinks of light began to filter through his brush house, and he took a friendly kick at the chicken who stalked ridiculously through the doorless door. It clucked indignantly and then ignored him, pecking furiously and futilely at a cockroach, while Misael checked his shoes for scorpions and spiders, and ensured that no coral snake was in the brush roof. Satisfied that all was in order, he took his machete and went down to the river to whet it on one of the stones before he slashed down the bananas, cleared the maize field, and gelded
the mule. All this he had to accomplish before it got too hot to work.
He spat on the ground and cursed at the vultures lining the trees as he walked to the hacienda. Then he crossed himself, and for good measure muttered a secreto against evil that his mother had taught him in a language that he did not know.
Profesor Luis looked at the children on the floor in front of him. The oldest was fourteen and the youngest was four, and he taught all of them everything he knew, and a lot of things he had not even realised that he knew until he taught them. He came from a good family in Medellin that he truly hated, and from whom he had run away when he was seventeen. Now he was engaged to Farides, who cooked for the French couple, Françoise and Antoine Le Moing, at their estancia, and what he was not paid in pesos he was paid in gratitude and affection by the children and their families who knew that education was the only way up. Every girl in the surrounding countryside wanted to marry him and have clever children. Whenever the weary priest came, every two years or so, to marry those who had already cohabited for years, and to conduct funerals for those long-rotted since his last visit, he would visit Profesor Luis also, and they would talk about Camilo Torres, Oscar Romero, Jose Marti, and the oligarchy, and then the priest would go on his mule to the next stop in his vast parish, ignoring the contraceptives sold at the liquor and machete store, and remaining polite to the brujos, the magicians who could cure cattle and raise spirits.
Profesor Luis observed the vultures in the trees and instructed the oldest boy to shoot one, and also an iguana, because today it was biology. There was a sharp report and a hideous cacophony, and the boy returned, barely able to carry the repellent creature; then he went to find an iguana. The Profesor pointed out the parasites in the bird’s feathers, and they talked about parasites in general. He disembowelled the bird and carefully explained that this was the liver, you must not drink too much or yours will swell and you will die. These are the kidneys, drink clean water. These are the lungs, do not smoke. He showed them how if you press up on the talons, they close automatically. He took two sticks, cut off the wings, plucked the tail feathers, and they made a glider so he could explain the principles of flight.
Then the boy returned with a large green lizard, and with the aid of an old car battery and two copper wires they traced in the animal’s twitches the pathways of nerves, and drew the pathways in a big diagram in the dust outside.
At the end of the day Profesor Luis threw the remains of the vulture to the vultures and roasted the iguana on a spit over the embers. It was cheap and better than chicken. Farides came to the door of his hut and said, ‘Querido, you must know that it is very bad luck to kill a vulture.’
Consuelo the whore was not looking forward to Friday night. She was a little nauseous from the alcohol, and her insides felt like ground glass, because she had had to satisfy all the men who normally went to the other whores who had gone in the jeep. She thought of Friday night and said, ‘Mierda.’ She could not take Friday night off because she was a good whore, conscious of public service, and besides, it was the night when you earned the most, except for public holidays. She thought of how all the campesinos would be paid by the gringo farmers and come in on their mules. How they would become drunk and there would be the usual fights with machetes and someone would lose an arm. How the two rows of puterias up both sides of one street would be filled with queues of men getting drunker as they waited, and she would have to get drunk too so that she did not mind getting very sore indeed. What the hell; she was the only person in the whole village, apart from the other whores and Don Emmanuel’s employees, who had been able to afford a concrete floor. A whore at twelve, plenty of children, a concrete floor at twenty. It’s a good life, and no man tells you what to do unless it’s fair exchange.
The little three-year-old who belonged to Dolores the whore needed milk. She breast-fed him, because there was no food at the moment, and the nino liked it, and anyway, all the whores breast-fed each other’s children. It was a huge contented family with a thousand generous fathers, and every Thursday Don Emmanuel took you in a Land-Rover to the clinic in Chiriguana to check your blood so that you never made anyone ill.
Consuelo looked indifferently at the vultures, and went inside to straighten out the frizzes in her hair. She accepted uncritically that the more Spanish you looked, and the less like a Negro, the more the men would pay.
Hectoro’s mother was an Arahuacax Indian from the Sierra Nevada, but he looked like a conquistador, and consequently he had three wives who lived in separate mudblock houses four miles apart on the exact angles of an equilateral triangle so they would never meet and fight because they were jealous.
Hectoro was an intelligent and intolerant man who looked on life very simply. A man needs women – he had three; he needs shelter – he had three; he needs money – he was foreman on the gringo’s hacienda; he needs status – he had his own mule, a revolver in a holster, leather bombachos, he could rope a steer with infallible precision, and he could hold alcohol in his wiry frame like no man else. The doctor had told him he was to die of liver failure because of the drink, and truly his skin had become yellowed; but he was proud and fiery-tongued, and he had threatened to shoot the doctor, who had then changed his diagnosis to something less disagreeable.
Hectoro was so proud that he seldom spoke to anyone; indeed he openly despised everybody, especially the gringos for whom he worked. They respected him and put him in charge of everything, and they turned a blind eye when he nearly murdered a rustler by shooting him in the groin. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘I turned the son of a whore into a woman and found a job for him in the whorehouse. Let no man say I am not generous.’ Even those who hated him laughed and bought him drinks, and looked at him with the awe one has of a man who stalks death and would not mind dying, as long as it was over something important like a woman, or a mule, or an insult. On his left hand, his rein hand, he wore a black glove; in his mouth smouldered always a puro, a cool local cigar, and his eyes squinnied against the sun, against the smoke, against danger, against the vultures. He rode over to see if a steer had died.
At fifty years old, Pedro the hunter was an unusually old man. He lived alone in the scrub-land by a pool of clear water with his ten carefully-trained mongrel hunting dogs. He was strong and lithe, and could stalk tirelessly for days without sleep or lapse of concentration. He walked so fast that a horse was entirely unnecessary, and everyone knows that horses will only eat good grass.
Pedro could trap any creature whatsoever. He could noose a caiman and let it grow huge in his pool, feeding it offal, until he could sell the skin for a few pesos so that some woman could buy an alligator handbag in New York for one thousand dollars. He could trap a boa constrictor with a forked stick and keep it until someone wanted one for magic. He could extract the venom of the coral snake for use in tiny doses as an aphrodisiac, or in heavy doses for murder. He knew how to stand in the river with a lantern, and spear fish more delicate than trout and twice the size, and he knew how to mutter secretos in a cow’s ear so that its ulcers would disappear.
Today he both mourned and celebrated. For two weeks he had marked the spoor of the tigre, the jaguar that had become a rogue and killed two donkeys without eating them. For five hundred pesos the gringo had hired him to bring back the skin, and he and his dogs had gone with his wired Spanish musket. The dogs cornered the jaguar beneath an escarpment, and Pedro had shot it clean through the eye so the skin was unspoiled. He skinned it and sold the skin to the gringo for five hundred pesos. It was a huge cat and it had fought bravely. Pedro celebrated his success and mourned for the beautiful rare cat and for the two hunting dogs it had killed.
In the hacienda the gringo swigged back a glass of Glenfiddich and turned to his tight-lipped, unhappy wife.
‘I should get a fortune for that on the black market.’
‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ she said.
It was early on Friday evening when Capitan Rodrigo Jose Figueras and several
jeeps turned up with the whores and the men of the platoon, the men to swagger and bully, and the whores to fulfil the regular trade. No one liked the soldiers, and some men said they would not go to a whore who had had a soldier in her. ‘They are worse than gringos, because they try to be gringos when they are not. I spit on them.’
As the day cooled and the alcohol warmed, the tension lessened and hundreds of peasants arrived on muleback to get away from their women, their labour, their poverty, in order to forget and to live it up a little. The soldiers nearly stopped being soldiers, and even Figueras nearly forgot that he had been to the United States and had never really loved anyone.
But round about midnight, when Consuelo was already fully worn out and her concrete floor covered with cigarette ends and spittle, Capitan Rodrigo Figueras began to be bored and decided to go home to his tent by the river. He sent the Lieutenant and the Corporal to gather up the men, who cursed as they were dragged from the whorehouses and separated from their bottles. Formed up in a straggle in the dusty street, the Capitan made sure there were twenty-five men and ordered them to their jeeps.
Leaning against the leading jeep, Profesor Luis, twenty-two years old, and the gentlest man in the world, was tenderly kissing Farides, seventeen, and the loveliest girl in the whole district.
Figueras forced himself between them and thrust his stubbled face into that of Luis.
‘So,’ and the spittle spattered Luis’ shirt, ‘so, you son of a peasant bitch, you think you can grope your whore up against government property. I suppose you think you can spy on my jeep.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Luis, his eyes flickering. ‘I meant no harm, and she is not a whore. She is a virgin, and she is my fiancée.’
‘Would you marry her . . .’ and the Capitan coughed and spat and had to step back for balance, ‘if she was not a virgin and had been whored by twenty-five men?’