Pedro told Aurelio of the soldiers’ return, and he in turn informed Remedios. He guided her and her guerrilleros through the jungle by safe routes and they arrived in the pueblo two days before Figueras’ planned advance. Remedios returned Federico’s meagre possessions to Sergio and embraced him. ‘You had a fine son,’ she said. ‘We all miss him.’ Sergio sighed, ‘I too miss him, but he talks with me in my dreams, and Aurelio says he is very happy and is married.’
Remedios, proudly atheist, Marxist and materialist, sighed inwardly with pity for his superstition, and said, ‘I am very happy to hear it.’
General Fuerte was brought down by the band on the end of a rope tied around his waist. He had become so dejected that he had neither spoken nor moved unnecessarily for two months. He slept fitfully in an upright position and Father Garcia, convinced that the General had in fact already died, recited over him a mass for the dead even though his body was plainly still working. He had become like a dumb mascot or an old painting that no one examines closely any more. When Franco became irritated by having to drag the General along with the rope he merely coiled it around the latter’s waist and put the end of it in his hand. The General walked behind Franco like an automaton, leading himself by the rope. When the guerrilla band arrived at the pueblo, Franco drove a heavy stake into the ground and attached the General’s rope to it. He walked slowly around the stake until he was completely wound up, and sat catatonically against it through all the events which followed with two cats in his lap and one draped around his shoulders, purring.
That evening everyone noticed that the cats were becoming febrile; they paced restlessly, clawed at tree trunks, and climbed up on the roofs of the huts. The dogs slunk under tables, and the horses, donkeys and mules were whinnying in the fields and galloping pointlessly from one end to the other.
‘Something is going to happen,’ said Pedro to Remedios.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we are going to fight a battle that will never be forgotten. The animals can feel death in the air.’
Remedios, Pedro, Misael, Hectoro and Josef met for a council on strategy and tactics. Remedios wanted to harry the army with short surprise attacks in the usual guerrilla fashion. Misael wanted to fight a defensive battle from the ramparts and fortifications of the pueblo, and Hectoro was in favour of a cavalry charge at dawn into the enemy camp, armed mainly with machetes. Misael said that since they now had two machine-guns it would be child’s play to mow the soldiers down as they crossed the open spaces. Remedios maintained that with her plan they could keep the enemy continually confused and disorganised, and just wear away at their resistance without incurring any casualties of their own. Hectoro maintained that they could simply cut the enemy to pieces whilst they were still sleepy and unprepared. None of them were prepared to change their minds, and a serious argument followed which threatened to destroy the new alliance before it had even passed its infancy. Josef then appealed for the right to be heard.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘They are all good plans. We should use all of them.’
‘How?’ demanded Remedios and Hectoro at once.
‘Like this,’ said Josef and he beckoned to the others to follow him into the street. He took a stick and began to draw in the dust, a difficult operation because of the lightning assaults of the cats upon its flicking tip.
‘Here,’ said Josef, ‘is the pueblo, and here is the rampart. On the rampart are our two machine-guns, and the two machine-gunners and their loaders are the only people in the whole village.’ He drew another line, and Remedios bent down and removed the cat that leapt onto the end of the stick. ‘Here,’ continued Josef, ‘right out at the side are Remedios’ guerrillas, who will provide crossfire across the open space and make little attacks from the side when the new magazines have to be loaded into the machine-guns. You,’ he said, turning to Hectoro, ‘should take every single horse, mule and donkey, even if there are not enough to ride them, and go with your cavalry right round the back of the soldiers, following them at a distance so they do not see you. When we have massacred the soldiers and the ones that are left are lying low or retreating, the machine-guns will cease fire and so will Remedios, and you will charge through from the back and cut the soldiers to pieces!’
‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Hectoro.
‘Excellentisimo!’ said Remedios, patting Josef on the shoulder. ‘But why do you think they will attack in a simple frontal assault? They may do something more complicated.’
‘No, they will not,’ replied Josef. ‘They are still commanded by that fat officer who was here before. He is a coward and a fool who will always do the simplest thing. Also, he does not know that we have the guerrilleros here and he does not know that we have machine-guns. He is expecting to overrun a small pueblo of people armed only with rifles and machetes, and I am sure that he does not expect us to know that he is coming. It is obvious they will just attack us in the quickest and easiest way.’
‘If this works,’ said Remedios admiringly, ‘you should change your name to Bolivar.’
‘It will work,’ said Josef. ‘And furthermore I have a little trick with the machine-guns that I heard of in Bolivia from the Chaco war with Paraguay.’
On the next day Hectoro departed with his cavalry and skirted wide around the savannah to bring himself into position behind the army. He forbade camp-fires or lights of any kind, and went himself to watch the camp. In the morning he saw Figueras addressing his officers, and saw the officers go off to brief their men. He stayed long enough to see that the brigade was advancing in arrow formation and fanning out. He ran back to his cavalry and sent one of the children galloping off across the savannah to warn the pueblo of the imminent attack.
After their nerve-racking but uneventful advance the soldiers were choked with dust, perspiring in waterfalls beneath their helmets, and kicking out irritatedly at the cats who tripped them by playing with their bootlaces.
They halted at the edge of the razed fields, and Colonel Figueras came forward to examine the village through his binoculars. He noted with fear that there were ramparts and fortifications, but then saw with relief that the village was completely deserted except by cats. He calculated that with two thousand men and no defenders he was fairly likely to survive the engagement. He retreated to the back of his brigade just to be sure, and gave the order to advance with bayonets fixed. The whole brigade was nonchalantly advancing across the burnt fields when Josef popped above the rampart and let fly with one machine-gun. He cut a swathe through the line of infantry and watched the men throw themselves to the ground. He stopped firing and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Quick someone! The machine-gun has jammed.’
The soldiers sprang to their feet and charged, and simultaneously the second machine-gun opened fire, Josef opened fire, and the guerrilleros fired at will from the side. In the incomprehensible hurricane of bullets the soldiers whirled and fell for half an hour. Those not dead pretended to be, including Figueras, who flung himself into an irrigation canal and lay still before he crawled desperately away.
The machine-guns ceased, the guerrilleros ceased, and two hundred soldiers threw aside their arms and ran back to cover as a stampede of mules and donkeys rushed through them, hurling them to the ground and trampling them. The two hundred rose to their feet and Hectoro and the men and women of the village burst upon them firing revolvers into their chests from point blank range, and hacking their limbs and heads with their machetes. Coldly Hectoro dismounted and walked amongst the carnage, slicing the throats of all who still lived. Over each one he spat and muttered, ‘Hijo de Puta.’
Only fifty men of the brigade, including Figueras, escaped back to the camp and, leaving all their equipment behind, sped back to Valledupar in the lorries. Figueras noted with relief that he was the only surviving officer and that Major Kandinski was also missing. He began mentally rehearsing the history of his heroic exploits against overwhelming odds that he would include in his report.
Back on the field of slaugh
ter the victors were both jubilant and appalled. Shaken, pale and trembling, they embraced each other and then wandered dumbly among the fallen.
‘They were innocents,’ said Misael. ‘Look at them, they were all boys.’
‘Yes,’ said Pedro. ‘Little boys with mad leaders and fear in their hearts.’
‘Most of them have pissed themselves,’ said Josef. ‘Look at their trousers.’
The bodies lay strewn like broken scarecrows, twisted, bloody and unreal. They lay with their last expressions still on their faces; terror, agony, and incomprehension. The victorious warriors, not a single one of them even scratched, were stricken dumb with a horrified shame, and were too consumed with remorse and pity to declare a fiesta or jubilation of any kind. They sat among the dead idly stroking the cats and murmuring prayers.
‘We cannot bury all of these,’ said Remedios.
‘We cannot burn them,’ replied Josef. ‘It would be a sacrilege.’
‘We can bury them with Don Emmanuel’s tractor,’ suggested Pedro.
‘And I will conduct a funeral,’ said Garcia. ‘They should have a proper funeral.’
‘Go and get the tractor, Pedro,’ said Josef. ‘We will gather the bodies before the vultures get them.’
The victorious rebels worked in pairs, removing rings and identity discs and private papers, and then carrying the bodies by their ankles and armpits to the side of the field. ‘I think,’ said Dona Constanza, ‘it would be best to bury them in the canal that I had dug before I left. It would be simple to cover them over with the excavated earth, and then we could lay them side by side instead of in a heap. It would show more respect.’
Remedios was working with Tomas. She turned over her twentieth body in order to carry it away, but she gasped with dismay when she saw its face. Hurriedly she bent down and rifled in the man’s shirt for his identity disc. She stared at it and turned it over, as ifit should say something more on the back. Then she sat by the body and buried her head in her knees. She began to sob and Tomas put his hand on her shoulder. ‘What is it Medio? Did you know him?’
Remedios looked up at him pitifully, the tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘It is my little brother, Alfredo. I have not seen him since he was twelve years old. It might have been my bullet that killed him. I did not know he was conscripted.’
Tomas sat down beside her with his arm about her shoulder and wept with her. ‘Medio,’ he said, ‘we have all killed our brothers today.’ She pulled herself together and stood up. ‘I hardly knew him.’
Remedios would not let Alfredo be buried separately. The bodies were transported in the trailer to Dona Constanza’s canal, the operation taking most of the night and the following morning. As the spade of the tractor buried them beneath the spoil of the canal, Father Garcia recited the burial service and the names of the dead, and then said a mass for their souls. Only Hectoro refused to attend, and Aurelio hesitated long, before he blessed them in Aymara and in Quechua. The cats gathered on the far bank of the canal and watched the whole proceeding.
Remedios filled several mochilas with identity discs and draped them around General Fuerte’s neck. ‘Go to Valledupar,’ she told him, ‘and be with your own kind.’
Without a word General Fuerte walked out of the pueblo, his bags jingling and clanking. The guerrilleros took despedida with him as far as Chiriguana, where they wished him good luck, took copas to drink his health, and flagged down a lorry to take him. He went without comment or expression, but he bent down and picked up a cat to take with him.
The plague of laughter was now over.
31
* * *
THE CONTINUING EFFORTS OF OLAF OLSEN, COLONEL ASADO, AND HIS EXCELLENCY, THE PRESIDENT
OLAF OLSEN WAS precisely what one would expect a successful Norwegian businessman to be. He was forty-five years old, blond, much younger-looking than his years would warrant, and very clear-headed. He retained the Norwegian passion for skiing and being very fit, and he had divorced at exactly the time when it became a craze in Scandinavia. He came originally from Oslo, and still had a house there, roughly half-way between the Munch Museum and Vigland’s Park. He had joined his company in Scandinavia when he was a young man, and had risen in it meteorically, entirely upon his own merit.
As an important foreign industrialist he knew almost everyone who mattered. He systematically exerted his influence on all of them, and began to notice that he was always accompanied at a distance by four men with anomalous trilby hats pulled low over their eyes. He ignored them, apart from wishing them good-day when he doubled back and passed them. Their confusion and embarrassment when he did this used to give him a little satisfaction to compensate for his growing despair and indignation.
The first thing that Olsen did was go back to the police, who confirmed that they had been notified by the Army of an official operation at the place and time that Regina had been abducted. The police had an unofficial agreement with the Armed Forces that they should be notified of all operations, because in the past the police had often been called by witnesses to the kidnappings and there had been several gun battles between the police and the military. The policeman who was in charge of logging radio messages was at first too terrified to tell Olsen what he wanted to know, but his fear was overcome by a handful of American dollars and Olsen’s assertion that he knew someone who could have him shot. The policeman furtively ran through the log and told Olsen that his daughter had been taken by a task-force from the Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering.
After leaving police headquarters, Olsen visited every hospital in the capital and for a hundred miles around. There were not many of them, but at each one he had to ‘give a donation to the hospital’ in order to be shown the admission lists. It turned out to be quite futile, as all cases brought in by the military were entered under the wrong sex, the wrong nationality, and the wrong name. He even found one entry which said ‘Pato Donald’ and another which said ‘Raton Miguel’.
Olsen wrote to the President through the Norwegian Ambassador, and told him that if his daughter was not released within ten days he would inform the national press, the Norwegian press, and the press in the United States. The President’s office replied immediately that the heads of all the security forces had been instructed to find her, giving her case top priority. Olsen could not understand this, as he had already told the President’s office exactly where Regina was, and who had taken her. In the following ten days he received these letters:
[a]
From: The Army School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering.
Dear Mr Olsen,
We are sorry to hear of the disappearance of your daughter, but are surprised that you informed the President that she is with us. As you know, we are a military college, and therefore take no prisoners, even in war time. Good luck in your search.
[b]
From: The Army Internal Security Service.
Dear Mr Olsen,
We are sorry to have to tell you that our investigations have revealed that your daughter Regina has eloped to Thailand with her lover. She had felt that you would have opposed their marriage, as the gentleman in question was a black man, forty years her senior, who was involved in anarchist politics, having spent twenty years in prison for child molestation.
We are very sorry to have to give you this bad news.
[c]
From: The Chief of City Police.
Dear Mr Olsen,
I refer to the letter recently received from the President’s Office, and also to the visit you paid to us in the company of the late General Correra. If you want to find your daughter, I must remind you of what I told you on that occasion.
There is in this country a very dirty war going on between elements of the extreme right wing and elements of the left. All the evidence points to the fact that Regina was caught in the crossfire of this dirty war in a case of mistaken identity, and is now in the hands of right-wing extremists, whose identity at this time I am
unable to reveal for various reasons you will understand.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your search, and advise you to exercise as much caution and discretion as paternal love will permit, in dealing with these very dangerous people.
[d]
From: The Service of State Information.
Dear Mr Olsen,
We have made extensive enquiries into the whereabouts of Regina Olsen, your daughter. Our information reveals that your daughter was a secret member of the extreme left, and was involved in terrorism. We believe that she has gone into hiding.
[e]
From: The Foreign Ministry Intelligence Division.
Dear Mr Olsen,
Our enquiries in the case of the disappearance of your daughter, Regina, reveal that she was a secret member of an extreme right-wing terrorist organisation ‘The Double C’, and was killed in a gun battle between them and a left-wing gang in Colombia. We are sorry to have to be the purveyors of this sad news.
[f]
From: The Interior Ministry Internal Security Office.
Dear Mr Olsen,
We were very distressed to hear of the sudden disappearance of your daughter, Regina, and have made every effort to find her, sparing no expense.
We are informed that she was last seen hill-walking in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita, and reports suggest that she fell to her death down a disused mineshaft whose location we have as yet been unable to ascertain. We are desolated to have to give you this bad news.