The soldiers looked at one another and smiled nervously, not sure whether to be horrified or delighted.
Profesor Luis wanted to shrink away, but he said, ‘I would defend her to the death. I shall go to the police.’
Figueras turned to the Corporal; ‘Show him who are the police.’
Profesor Luis crumpled as the rifle butt crunched into the back of his neck. Farides threw herself down on her hands and knees and wailed. The Capitan leaned forward and jerked her upright by the hair. ‘Tell us,’ he said, ‘that you are a little whore, and we will not feel obliged to turn you into one.’
A whore is a whore and has a whore’s honour. Farides was a virgin and hers was a virgin’s honour. They are both honour but they are separate and must not be confused. Her eyes bulged and rolled as the Capitan began to rotate his hand on her breast. She felt an urgent need to vomit, and her knees shook, but she said, ‘I am not a whore. I am the fiancée of Don Luis the Profesor.’
‘Take the little whore to the schoolhouse and prepare her,’ ordered the Capitan. They dragged her off, shrieking and writhing, and began to tear away her clothes. They slung her across the desk and pinned her down whilst she wept and pleaded and the Capitan finished his cigarette and thought of a new paintmark on his jeep.
He was about to crush the stub beneath his foot when in the doorway appeared Pedro with his Spanish musket, Hectoro with his revolver, and Consuelo the whore with a machete.
‘Capitan,’ said Hectoro, emphasising every word, ‘if you do not release the girl and leave this village immediately, your body will be fed to the caiman in Pedro’s pool and your men will be able to report that one stinking son of a diseased sow has ceased to serve himself and the yanquis and the pretence of a government!’
Sweat trickled down the temples of Capitan Rodrigo Jose Figueras, and a dark patch spread down the armpits and the back of his military shirt. He glared at Hectoro defiantly, but his lower lip quivered. ‘Vamos!’ he said to his men, and they filed out, almost apologetically. Farides turned on her side and whimpered until Consuelo the whore came in and covered her with a blanket and whispered words of comfort to her.
The jeeps roared away into the night, scattering the chickens and raising a plume of dust. A shocked and indignant knot of people gathered in the street, and Farides emerged trembling, wrapped in her blanket. Shyly she kissed Hectoro and Pedro on the cheek, and then knelt down and cupped Profesor Luis’ head whilst somebody fetched some water.
One kilometre down the road, Capitan Rodrigo Figueras ordered his driver to stop and took something from a box on the back of the jeep. As he had been trained by the gringos in Panama, he slunk swiftly and noiselessly back along the track. He circled the huts through a maize field, and came out between two of the dwellings just next to the knot of people. He drew a pin from the grenade and lobbed it spinning into the crowd before he ducked away.
Three days later, the national radio issued a broadcast:
‘Three days ago a unit of government troops near Asuncion in Cesar surprised a group of communist insurgents and killed five of them, wounding twenty in a brief engagement. No troops were killed, and Capitan Rodrigo Figueras has been promoted to comandante and recommended for decoration. General Carlo Maria Fuerte, military commander in the area, said in an interview this morning that he and all units under him were deeply committed to, and would continue, the fight against the Cuba-led communist conspiracy to terrorise the free people of this country and subvert their liberties.’
It was on that same night that Federico, the fourteen-year-old who had shot the vulture for Profesor Luis, got out of his hammock at two o’clock in the morning, stole his father’s rifle and two boxes of shells and disappeared somewhere in the foothills that are neither quite in one country nor in its neighbour.
2
* * *
IN WHICH DONA CONSTANZA EVANS RESOLVES TO SAVE THE SWIMMING POOL FROM DROUGHT
DONA CONSTANZA EVANS, having risen from her silken sheets at ten o’clock when the air-conditioning had finally lost the daily battle against the heat and humidity of the equatorial morning, took a cool shower in water from her own purification plant, and towelled herself dry before the mirror. She possessed the gift of all spoiled women, that of being able to follow several inconsequential trains of thought simultaneously and to believe them all to be of incalculable importance. Thus she inspected her forty-year-old body according to the habit she had followed since puberty, and thought about the recent exploits of the army in the village, in which her groom had been killed by a fragment of grenade. She thought also of the problem of the swimming pool, which lost half its water, turned green with algae, and became full of grateful frogs during every dry season.
‘I do not know how I am expected to exercise in such a pool,’ she thought as she raised a plump but unprepossessing breast in order to dry beneath it. ‘It is long since I saw my navel unconcealed by this terrible fat – it is the price of children, and little good they do you at birth or after.’ As she dabbed at her face she paused suddenly: ‘Next time I am in the Estados Unidos I will make enquiries of operations so that I may be as young as I please. I had no idea Juanito was a communist. I wonder if my two children caused my passage to expand – perhaps that is why Hugh no longer demands his rights of me at night. Still, if the army say he was a communist then he was a communist and he should have been killed as he was. No doubt Hugh has taken a woman – probably a campesina whore, they are all sluts. The army, after all, is trained by the yanquis, and so no doubt they know their job. I swear the skin of my thighs is becoming coarser. I should take a campesino lover, for preference a big shiny black Negro with muscles, or a mestizo, and see how Hugh likes that! Really the pool is an abomination; one could die of cholera like Tchaikovsky. Juanito would have been a fine lover if you saw him petting the horses. A man who has a way with animals has a way with a woman, so they say. Perhaps it was Beethoven.’ She parted her legs and dried herself there with more application than she had intended. ‘By the Virgin, I must be more careful with myself or I shall be burned away! I must find a new groom. Truly life is one hurdle after another, for it appears we are not born to happiness in this world. I wonder if it was typhus. I hear that there is such a thing as spontaneous combustion. It would be fortunate if there were a man or a maid with a bucket of water nearby. They say the fragment went through Juanito’s temple and destroyed his brain inside his head.’ She put a dainty foot on the mahogany chair to dry between the toes, looked up through the window (consisting in fact of fine anti-mosquito mesh, for even the Evanses were not stupid enough to have glass windows in such a climate), and admired the hundred or so pedigree horses of different varieties which grazed in the field. She was trying to spot her finest palomino when it occurred to her that she could divert the Mula. ‘I will dig a channel towards the purification plant from the river, and I will install some kind of gate to lower into the water so that it flows down the channel when it is required to do so. Moreover, I will not tell Hugh, or he will invent some reason to prevent it. I will pretend that it is a present to him for his birthday, and in this way when I go to New York I will not have to spend my allowance on a gift.’
Dona Constanza pouted alluringly to herself in the mirror and thought suddenly of Juanito. A twinge of sadness and regret passed simultaneously behind her eyes and through her heart. But then she drew herself up and breathed deeply inwards, and the traces of the sixteen-year-old she once had been vanished from her face as the mantle of cold dignity settled itself about her. When she had dressed she emerged for breakfast every inch the Spanish aristocrat.
There were in that country, as in all those troubled countries, only four social groups to speak of. At the bottom of the social scale were the fourteen million Negroes who were directly descended from thirteen hundred slaves imported by the conquistadores to build the giant fortress of Nueva Sevilla after they had discovered that Indians made very inadequate slaves. They would not give up their gods and pre
ferred to starve themselves to death rather than submit to indignity. The Negroes on the other hand, being from different parts of West Africa, had no common language, so it was a simple matter to confuse them and to brutalise them into being enlightened by Christianity. It is, after all, a consolation for present hell when one is promised future heaven, and their irrepressible humour and stoicism, along with their magnificent physiques and stature, enabled them to labour prodigiously under the whip and the brand. When the fortress was complete, and its dungeons well stocked with English pirates with royal patents from Queen Elizabeth, the slaves were released to fend for themselves. From these humble beginnings they emerged eventually as campesinos, the indispensable providers of nourishment for the entire nation. Consequently they were the poorest of all people and the most despised, even by themselves. Those who took to the favelas, the barrios, and the innumerable shanty-towns were driven by poverty and disease to theft, extortion, prostitution, violence and drink, and were therefore even more comprehensively reviled than the peasants, their brothers.
Existing in a world almost wholly unrelated to that of all other classes were the Indians. One half of them, the Incas, lived almost exclusively at altitudes greater than two thousand metres. At all such altitudes they reckoned, accurately, that almost no one would bother to come and look for them. Thus they lived peacefully in their carefully built grass huts, tending their terraces, chewing coca leaves, worshipping Pachacamac, and coming back to the plains solely in order to sell mochilas (their very practical and beautifully decorated carrying bags with a shoulder strap), and potatoes. If you were to see a particularly fine mule, it would always have with it a particularly fine Indian dressed in a white tunic, with a white domed hat set upright on a shining black head of hair. It was not so much their Mongolian features that impressed everyone, although these were both beautiful and impressive, but their sandals made from car tyres and the phenomenal muscularity of their calves. Most of them carried muskets in perfect working order which had been taken from the Spaniards centuries before, and on account of this, and because it was commonly said that all Indians had syphilis, everyone left them alone. The government was dimly aware that they were a species of national monument, and appointed officers to ensure their protection and preservation, who, fortunately, did nothing to earn their salaries. Thus the noble people lived on undisturbed, except by the not infrequent crashes of army helicopters, the inoffensive and almost unnoticeable visits of diffident anthropologists from Oxford and Cambridge, and the straggling parties of mountaineers with peeling noses and diarrhoea who also came for the most part, and perhaps curiously enough, from Britain. It should surprise no one if in two thousand years there are still Acahuatecs and Arahuacax sucking coca pounded with snail shells from their pestles at altitudes greater than seven thousand feet in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita; for they are a people who have learned by their own blood the wondrous disadvantages of an eventful history.
The other half of the Indian population occupied the jungle regions below the foothills, and although the one population graduated into the other, they were quite different in appearance and way of life.
Slightly above the Negros but not wholly so was the class of mestizos and mulattos. These people of different racial mix were perhaps physically the most surprising of all the peoples in that land for whilst they all possessed the broadish nose and frizzy hair of the Negro, sometimes the hair was blonde, or ginger, and sometimes the eyes were blue, or green, or amber. Their skins were pale yellow, and most faces would have one or two dark brown beauty spots. Perhaps some of them were sallow-complexioned thanks to the many preparations one could buy for whitening the skin, for in lands where power is not in the hands of the majority, the masses invariably adopt the snobberies and prejudices of the rulers, as if to say, ‘Look, I am not one of the oppressed; I, too, am superior.’ From the mestizo class was being born an embryonic petit bourgeoisie who lived in the suburbs of the bigger towns, who bought televisions which received only the confused flickerings of the transmitters in the capital. The signal, having been bounced from peak to peak over hundreds of miles so that all the wavelengths were cancelled out by interfering with themselves, would arrive at sets powered by anything between one hundred and three hundred volts, depending upon the vagaries of the public generating system or their own generators. One could walk down the streets of Valledupar at night and see through the windows mestizo families peering intently at the bright square of leaping and buzzing lines and spots as though they were interpreting runes or the flight of birds. When by some freak of atmospheric conditions a picture appeared or a line of speech was discernible, there would follow a minute of animated discussion and comment from the family and the mother and the oldest sister would come in from the kitchen, and then they would return, leaving the family to gaze hypnotised once more by the scrambled and undecipherable traces of old cowboy films, The Flintstones, the usual nonsense from the USA, and advertisements for skin-whitener.
The pallid mulattas provided the country’s most industrious because most popular prostitutes, for from a white’s point of view they were sufficiently black for them to be exotic, and congress with them to be naughty without being too shocking. From a black’s point of view they were sufficiently white for them to be exotic, and congress with them to be something of an honour. To mestizo men, mulatta women were of course absolutely ordinary, so they frequented the black brothels, which were sufficiently exotic and naughty for such visits to be satisfactory. White prostitutes did not exist, but if they had, they would have been immensely popular, tired, and rich, and no doubt many blacks and mestizos would have been trampled to death in the rush every Saturday night.
To say that there were no white whores is, on reflection, a little misleading, for I have yet to come to the Spanish aristocracy which constituted the oligarchy, whose daughters were out for nothing but to marry the richest man they could find in order that they could live the idlest and most fatuous lives possible. These virtuous ladies of course gave their doting husbands as little congress as possible for their money, thus driving them into the arms of those women who were somewhat less chaste, virtuous and untouchable. It would be impossible to describe what manifold and formidable maladies the ladies of the rich could feign. They pined away for the most part in exquisitely refined boredom alleviated only by the careful and repeated perusal of risque and romantic novels which they paid their maids to buy for them from shops with fat, sweaty and balding proprietors who put on literary airs. Thus these ladies lived life at one remove from everything that makes the world interesting and exciting, and sought each other’s company as if by gravitational force in order to create rumours and spread scandals which nearly always ended unfortunately, since unsuspecting husbands found themselves dragged in to defend family honour over slights and fabrications upon which lawyers grew rich, and which could even lead to assassinations by highly-paid professionals known as jaguncos.
The oligarchy was a large network of immensely rich landowners, descended from the conquistadores, who had been illiterate robber barbarians who had destroyed entire civilisations in the name of Jesus, the Virgin, the Catholic kings, and gold. In this way they ensured a perpetual sinecure in paradise for their immortal souls, and perpetual admiration from generations of schoolchildren who were taught in history lessons of their magnificent and daring exploits against the pagan savages whose phenomenal towns and monuments one can still see today (in ruins).
The oligarchy were of course all related to each other by marriage and by self-interest, now more than ever after La Violencia. During this period, which had lasted ten years, two factions of the oligarchy had conducted an unprecedentedly bloody campaign of violence against each other in which perhaps three hundred thousand souls perished at the hands of jaguncos and guerrillas, both of whom accrued so much money that it amounted to a redistribution of wealth that was almost significant.
The oligarchy was divided into liberals and conservatives,
who were united in their terror of communism after the success of the Cuban revolution, especially as many of them had had interests in the brothels and casinos of Havana; others had had interests in pharmaceutical companies which manufactured drugs to cure the diseases spread by the former, and some in supplying guns to be used by gangs struggling for control of the latter. However, the liberals and conservatives differed over how to combat the spread of such appalling beliefs as ‘equality’, ‘fair pay’ and ‘democracy’. The conservatives believed in coming down hard on them; this involved being curt with your campesinos, keeping them illiterate, and paying them a fixed wage of one hundred and fifty pesos a week. The liberals on the other hand believed in being jolly with your campesinos, teaching them to read bits of paper with instructions on them, and paying them a fixed wage of one hundred and fifty pesos a week. In this way they hoped that the peasants would become too contented to bother to be communists. The whole situation became infinitely confused by the conservatives’ habit of describing the liberals as ‘communists’.
Eventually, in an historic feat of compromise, democracy was restored by the abolition of elections, and the two parties agreed to rule alternately for four year periods, thus postponing La Violencia indefinitely.
As peace settled once again, the oligarchy returned to its old pursuits of appointing its oldest sons to high office in the state, its second sons to high office in the church, and the rest of its sons to high office in the armed forces. Meanwhile some of the peasants almost became communist without even having heard the word.
Dona Constanza Evans, with whom our digression began, and with whom it now finishes, was a conservative, being a direct descendant, like all aristocrats, of a particularly brutal and successful barbarian. Her husband, Don Hugh Evans, was in fact the descendant of a nineteenth-century Welsh speculator, and was still officially a British citizen. Consequently his two sons went to Harrow, where they became fairly muscly in the legs and extremely Anglophile, apparently under the illusion that Harrovians were representative of the English as a whole. Naturally they felt very much at home amongst such civilised people.