Dona Constanza sent for her foreman to instruct him to dig a canal, and sent a message to Profesor Luis which read, ‘Did Tchaikovsky or Beethoven die of cholera or typhus?’
3
* * *
IN WHICH FEDERICO’S ROMANTIC GESTURE TAKES ON WIDER IMPLICATIONS
WHEN FEDERICO CREPT away from his father’s adobe house with the rifle and the two boxes of shells it cannot be said that it was with any clear idea in his head of what he was going to do or how he was to do it. All that there actually was in his head was a kind of astonished outrage and a relentless determination to do something spectacular by way of vengeance. He had frequently witnessed bloodshed in his short life, but what he had just witnessed in the village was of a different kidney from machete fights over a woman or an insult, or the gruesome amputations of snake-bitten limbs, or even the incomprehensible agony of his mother when giving birth to Francesca, which he had watched from the corner of the hut with a sense of desperate awe. The difference was that all the violence and pain be had seen hitherto had seemed to have a point to it, and whilst it was regrettable, it had never been spurious, and had therefore not been shocking. The carnage accompanying Capitan Rodrigo Figueras’ little exploit, and the subsequent hysteria, triggered into life that sense of moral anger and disgust that hitherto Federico had only experienced the glimmer of, when Profesor Luis blamed him for something he had not done. Secondly, the campesino has a most rigid sense of honour, the most precious and prized possession of those who have next to nothing, and which is the one public and personal voice which must at all times be obeyed without question, even beyond common sense and death. It is honour that will cause a man to spend thirty years not talking to his favourite brother or his son because of an affront, or to starve for a year in order to pay a debt or keep a promise. It is honour that will spur men to the most futile, heroic, and stupid extremes out of bravado and machismo, and it is as though they have never heard that the days of Tirant lo Blanc and Don Quixote are long dead. This kind of honour is an exclusively male preserve, for the women of these lands have a code of honour which is infinitely tempered by compassion, humour, and common wisdom, which has nothing to do with those irrational, dogmatic absolutes of the male which provoke him either to astonishingly fine feats of valour or the most depressingly fatuous feats of unfathomable insanity. Sometimes these are inextricably mixed up together, and one would not know whether to weep with despair or to weep with admiration. Capitan Figueras, for example, probably had thrown his grenade out of injured honour, for he had been comprehensively dishonoured and humiliated by a hunter with a musket, a man who looked like a conquistador with a revolver, and a whore with a machete.
Federico on the other hand had lost his uncle Juanito, he had seen his teacher beaten to the ground with a rifle by a repulsive fat officer, his cousin Farides nearly violated, and his own dog had been so badly mutilated that his father, Sergio, had been obliged to shoot it between the eyes with the very rifle he was now carrying away like a kidnapped baby. Federico therefore had a most personal reason for wishing death upon the Capitan, who was in the army, which was in the employ of the state. It is surely true that ultimately all campesino revolutionaries are motivated in the first place not by ideals or economic theories, but by a deeply felt sense of offended dignity. But even if this were not generally the case, it was certainly true of Federico, who would only learn to hate the whole army, the state, and the United States which propped it up long after he took to the hills in order to live wild and ruminate over his plans for retribution and the satisfaction he would feel in exacting it.
At this point he was still a one-boy revolution with a large part of him consisting of a mush of romantic impossibilities. It had not occurred to him that he could not kill every officer in the army just to ensure that he got Figueras, nor had he thought he would miss the cheerful, anarchic poverty of village life, the bright eyes of Francesca, or the corralling of the ceibu steers at market time. He thought of himself as an heroic avenging angel of death, not as a wandering boy with a rifle that would bruise his shoulder every time he fired it, with nothing else but a mochila filled with bocadillos wrapped in palm leaves, three avocado pears, and two boxes of shells.
By the time that dawn had launched the red sun rapidly above the mountains, Federico was in a humbler frame of mind than he had been at two o’clock that morning. He had walked several miles, it is true, past the hacienda of the gringo with the aeroplane, and he was already near the jungle before the foothills of the Cordillera where the ground is half in patches of lush verdancy and half in stony waste, sprouting with the lunar columns built by termites; but he had been startled by every whistle and rustle of every creature that had crossed his footsteps. He started and sweated with fear each time he came face to face with the enormous silhouette of a steer, or a rock, and he imagined that every glimmer of moonlight on his path was a coral snake rearing to strike. In addition the sling of the rifle was already wearing a sore on his shoulder, and the magazine constantly thumped the same spot above his kidneys as he stumbled through the darkness. The Lee Enfield also seemed to be growing heavier, but he clung to it doggedly, and when there was sufficient light he sat on a rock and caressed its stock in much the same mood of tenderness and exaltation as that he had dreamed he would feel when first caressing a woman.
He set the rifle aside and reached into his mochila for the bocadillos, whose sweetness and savour of guavas stroked away like a mother’s hand the recent terrors of the night. He carefully wrapped the remainder of the slab in the palm leaf and looked around for a spot where the sun would not fall for a few hours. He fell asleep amongst the stones in the shade of the rock, where he dreamed of his mutilated dog and the coarse hairs of the belly of Capitan Figueras where they bulged through the buttons of his shirt.
When he awoke at midday it was for two reasons; firstly, because the sun had moved over the rock and was so hot that he dreamed he was being turned to ashes, and secondly because a young kid was chewing the leg of his trousers. When he opened his eyes and looked into those of the goat his immediate thought was that the devil had come for him, for there is in the yellow iris and rectangular slot of a pupil in the eye of the goat something that is horrifyingly alien and impersonal. The kid skittered away a couple of metres, and Federico gazed at it a few seconds before deciding to shoot it for meat. With trembling excitement, but also guilt, he stood up, slid the bolt back and firmly forward, and raised the rifle to his shoulder. The crash of the .303 sent him stumbling back with the agony of what felt like a broken collar bone, and he thrashed in the air to regain his balance. When he had done so he was strangely relieved to find that he had missed the goat completely, even from such close range, and that it was looking at him with a kind of comic surprise from behind a citrus tree. He was wondering whether his shoulder could stand another attempt, and was cocking the gun once more, when a voice behind him said ironically, ‘Buena’ dia’, Senor.’
He turned around suddenly and pointed the gun from the hip in a panicky parody of that move so well-documented in cowboy films, to come face to face with a very tall campesino of dark complexion who was smoking a puro, and holding in his hand a long staff. He spat, looked about coolly, and said, ‘I suppose you like to shoot other people’s goats for no reason.’
Federico returned his gaze ashamedly and said, ‘I did not know it was your goat, Senor.’
‘All goats belong to someone.’
‘Yes, Senor, I am very sorry, Senor.’
The campesino tapped the end of the rifle with his staff. ‘Perhaps you should point that somewhere else. I am larger than the goat and not so easy to miss.’
Federico lowered the gun, and began to walk away backwards, wondering if he should do so with dignity or break into a run, but the peasant said, ‘I think you should give me the gun. It will be compensation for shooting at the goat.’
‘The gun is not mine to give,’ replied the boy, astonished and confused. ‘It is my father??
?s, and I did not shoot the goat.’
‘Ah,’ said the peasant. ‘The priest says that the evil intention is as bad as the evil deed itself. You should therefore give me the gun.’
‘But it is my father’s!’
‘You are your father’s responsibility. To save me going all the way to see him, I will take the gun directly. I see it is a very enviable gun, and I will have it.’ And he strode forward to take hold of the barrel.
Federico felt panic rise from his stomach to his throat, and suddenly a torrent of salty sweat poured down his forehead into his eyes and blinded him.
‘No!’ he shouted, and pulled the rifle. The peasant hit him across the side of the head with the palm of his hand, and took advantage of the boy’s discomfiture to pull hard at his end of the barrel.
What he had not known, and had not even thought of in his eager attempt to steal the weapon from the boy, was that the boy’s forefinger had already taken up first pressure on the trigger; there was another resounding crash as he wrenched the weapon towards him, and the bullet passed clean through his sternum and shattered two vertebrae on its way out of his back. An expression of wonder passed over the man’s face as he toppled backwards and began to die, while Federico, paralysed with shock, fell forward on his knees and vomited violently before he started to weep and rock backwards and forwards with his hands over his face, whimpering as his mutilated dog had done.
When Federico dared to look up from his weeping he saw that a dark stain had spread across the shirt of the peasant, that his eyes had clouded and glazed, and that blood was trickling gently from the corners of his mouth. The body already looked as though there was nobody at home, and the puro lay smoking in the stones as though nothing very important had happened. Federico knew without looking that the man was completely dead, and that he was responsible. He sat numbly against the rock, and in a strange but appropriate gesture of respect, smoked the rest of the dead man’s cigar down to the stub, just as the dead man would have done. Federico was not to stop shaking and retching for two days. After this he merely shook; this was his second encounter with pointless death in as many days.
Federico began to pile stones around the body, but he could not bear to see the man’s upturned eyes every time he approached, nor could he bear to see the flies that had already gathered to lay their eggs, nor the stream of ants that had appeared from nowhere and were crawling in a black unanimous stream up the man’s cheek, into his eyes and into his open mouth.
There was a guttural croak behind him, and he turned, violently frightened, to see a repulsive hook-beaked, bald-headed, moth-eaten turkey-vulture on the ground, its wings stretched and beating slowly. It was looking at him with one eye. He bent down and picked up a rock to hurl at the bird, which croaked once more, and skipped backwards impatiently. There was a flurry of wings and two more birds arrived to see if the corpse was really dead. One of them tentatively pecked at an upturned eye and plucked it out, at which point Federico gathered up the rifle and ran stumbling away, unaware that Pedro the Hunter and Aurelio the Indian had been watching him for the last ten minutes from the cover they had sought whilst tracking a small deer.
It was purely by chance that Dona Constanza was inspecting her tack in the stables when Pedro was outside confiding in Sergio that his son had killed a man. That night, full of that indignant public spirit which all conservatives manifest over matters of law and order, she wrote to the nearest chief of police two hundred kilometres away in Cucuta. Not wishing to be disturbed by having to do his job, this official sent it to the capital, where three months later it was filed and forgotten, to moulder ominously for years like a forgotten land-mine.
So it was that Federico’s personal revolution, like all wars and revolutions, began with the death of an innocent, who in this case had four children to provide for and had always wanted to own a gun.
4
* * *
IN WHICH SERGIO GRAPPLES WITH THE PROBLEM OF THE CANAL
IN THE LAST few days events had conspired to disrupt Sergio’s life quite severely. Firstly, his twin brother Juanito had been murdered by the army, but the following night he had appeared in a dream and reassured Sergio that everything was all right. He had also confirmed that when his body was well-rotted Sergio could disinter his head and hire it out for magic at a good profit, for everyone knew that the skull of a twin was by far the most potent channel of communication with the angels. The loss of his beloved brother, therefore, was a grief that could be borne with some degree of equanimity.
Secondly, Federico had disappeared with the rifle, Sergio’s most treasured possession, and moreover he had, according to the hunter, killed a man with it. Sergio knew in his heart that his son had gone off on some necessary business that was to do with becoming a man, as he himself had done at roughly the same age when he had gone to look for emeralds in the cordillera, but he was angry about his Enfield even though in fact he had never used it, but always kept it against the day when violence would erupt in the countryside as his twin’s intuition told him it surely would. He was also anxious that the relatives of the dead man would find out who had killed him and arrive one night with blazing torches to exact vengeance in the name of honour.
Thirdly, Dona Constanza’s bizarre plan had placed him in a truly invidious position, as had rapidly become apparent in the bar of the brothel when he had divulged it to the company. They had all babbled excitedly at once, but it was Hectoro who had expressed the problem most concisely.
‘The fact is,’ he said, looking around from face to face, ‘that the Mula supplies all of us and our fields, and such a canal would reduce our crops to dust in the dry season and ourselves to skeletons. It is only in any case a puddle of piss in the dry season, and that’s without any of it being drawn off by Dona Constanza.’
‘The fact also is,’ replied Sergio, ‘that Dona Constanza owns the land where the Mula runs, she employs nearly all of us, she has the legal right to do what she wants, and it will be we who have to dig the canal for her stupid swimming pool.’
‘Dona Constanza has the best land hereabouts,’ said Misael, ‘and yet on it she keeps only horses which do no work. I know where she can put her legal rights and that is a place where Don Hugh seldom goes for fear of his health.’
Misael grinned, his white teeth gleaming in the lamplight. He crossed his eyes and made a lewd corkscrewing motion upwards with his index finger, so that even Hectoro laughed.
‘Surely,’ said Josef, screwing up his eyes against the ghostly blue cigar smoke that was curling and twisting about the room before accelerating upwards out of the door, ‘a canal would not hold the water, nor even a trench, for the earth is so dry it would suck away the water faster than Hectoro drinks aguardiente.’
‘Then we should tell Dona Constanza to make a pipeline with a windmill pump of the kind that Profesor Luis knows how to make, and that would do it,’ replied Hectoro. ‘And I will not have my honour insulted, Josef, or I will feed your cojones to the pigs.’
‘My wife has already bitten them off,’ exclaimed Josef. ‘But to return to the matter which is more important than your honour, or even my testicles, I think you are right, Hectoro. I think Sergio should suggest a pipe; though it is still a waste of water, it is less stupid than a canal.’
Dolores and Consuelo had been listening to this male discourse and whispering to each other from their position behind the bar, and at last Dolores let out a long throaty chuckle, and said in her rum-and-cigars voice, ‘Ah, you men, the trouble with you is that you approach every problem directly.’
‘And the trouble with women is that they should hold their tongues when men talk of serious matters, but they never do,’ rejoined Hectoro.
‘Nor should they,’ said Consuelo. ‘You men should listen to Dolores, who has more sense than all of you, especially as she has learned to read and therefore knows about the world.’
‘Yes,’ said Dolores, ‘but this is just common sense. The Mula, you ought to know, ru
ns through the land of Don Emmanuel after it has been past the pueblo, and he needs the water as we do. Go to see him, and he will stop Dona Constanza for his sake and for ours. It is obvious.’
There was a long silence, during which Hectoro finished his drink before announcing, ‘Companeros, it is a great grief to me when women are in the right.’
‘Dolores,’ said Misael, his eyes twinkling with mischief, ‘that is an idea so intelligent that in future I will let you fuck me for nothing.’
‘That is very kind,’ retorted Dolores, ‘but for you it is still five pesos!’
‘Then warn me when you have been with him,’ said Josef, ‘for I should not like any of mine to get mixed with his!’
Don Emmanuel was an anomaly. His father had been an eminent progressive educationalist in England, who had decided that his son should attend his own establishment, and consequently Emmanuel had grown up half-naked and unusually blunt. He had also known, through his father, the immensely cerebral and unhappy philosopher Bertrand Russell, and so he collected all of Russell’s works out of sentiment. He never read them, and if you were to have opened one you would have found it neatly bored in a thousand different directions by termites, so that reading them would be double the intellectual exercise that that very clear philosopher had intended; indeed, they had become so full of obscurity that one would have had the impression of reading surrealist verse, or perhaps an American disciple of Wittgenstein.
Don Emmanuel had attended Cambridge in order to study botany, and had joined the Conservative, the Labour, the Liberal, and the Communist parties all at once ‘to get a balanced view’. In his second year he had arrived in the tropics with an assortment of gangly, earnest and bespectacled botanists, lepidopterists, anthropologists, and zoologists in order to study the flora and fauna of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita. However, he was not at the assembly point at the appointed time of departure, and indeed never arrived at it ever. After a long, futile, and exasperated search, which consisted of horrendous treks through unmapped territory with the assistance of an army helicopter whose pilot was in fact just admiring the view, the party left disconsolately, believing that Emmanuel must be dead at the hands of brigands.