In fact he was living with the Acahuatecs, with whom he stayed for a year, after which he went to live with the Arahuacax, thus qualifying himself as the only white man who was able to act as a guide when mountaineers came from Britain to get peeling noses and diarrhoea.
After this he came down to the plains and found the tiny pueblo where he now lived, a place so insignificant that you still cannot find it on the map, even though it now has concrete floors thanks to the trade in marijuana and cocaine, which has indeed almost saved the country from the economic ruin which is always imminent.
When he arrived, dressed like an Indian, the first thing he did was go to the brothel where neither his strange appearance, his outlandish Indian dialect, nor his lack of funds prevented him from trying out each of the whores in turn.
Having thus established his credibility he spent several days wandering about the countryside until he came to a spot by the Mula which inspired him with a vision of a flourishing estancia. He immediately built himself a grass hut, Indian style, thatched it with palm, and to the wonder of the locals began to live like Diogenes and labour like Sisyphus, except with better results. By the time that the events described in this narrative began to unfold he owned a cool white hacienda which he had built himself, he had made a waterfall in the Mula to drive a generator, he had a tractor, more thousands of hectares than he could possibly count, thousands of steers that he would weep over when they went to market, and relations with the peasants as good as his relations with other rich whites were bad. This was because he had learned his Spanish in the brothel and the fields; therefore his conversation was enlivened with an astoundingly rich and varied lexicon of truly graphic expletives, and moreover he spoke it as though he had no front teeth, for the simple reason that the people from whom he had learned had, for the most part, no such front teeth themselves. Whenever he visited the capital a sort of collective shiver of horror would run up the spine of sophisticated society as he became more and more of a virtuoso enfant terrible, more especially as he was publicly proud of being officially dead and of having got away from his mother, who was so possessive that she moved to the United States in order to be close to his body, sublimely unaware that South America was a lot further away than a simple glance at a globe would seem to indicate, and that her son was alive and fucking.
Don Emmanuel had become a local legend both on account of his delight in healthy dissolution, his choice of peasants as his natural friends, and his prodigious social concern. He had built the village school and employed Profesor Luis to teach not only knowledge but wisdom to the raggedy children; he paid a quarter more than any other patron in the whole department, and he adopted a method of making breezeblocks in a wooden lattice so that he could build a little house for each of his employees. It was in his Land-Rover that the whores went every Thursday for their check-up, he arbitrated in domestic disputes, he never failed to labour alongside his men, and many local women were able to testify that even the purest bred Negros were not more lusty nor more satisfying than he was. The only thing that they thought unacceptable about him was that he would always refuse to smoke, a quirk that was considered anti-social in a land where everyone of peasant stock, man, woman and child always had a large cigar stuck in their mouth, where only effeminate oligarchs smoked cigarettes, and where pipes were smoked only by French engineers and English alpinists. These cigars are, like their coffee, easily the most sublime in the world, but of both commodities they keep the best to themselves, exporting only the dross for the world’s connoisseurs to praise. To smoke one of those cigars outdoors of an evening in a hammock whilst drinking half a litre of thick black coffee is to condemn oneself unknowingly to a lifetime of nostalgia.
When Sergio and his friends arrived to tell Don Emmanuel of Dona Constanza’s calamitous plan, they found him stark naked in the Mula washing his clothes and singing a very rude ditty at the top of his voice to the tune of the national anthem, a melody so turgid and unmemorable that even oligarchs sometimes fail to recognise it and stand to attention.
When he beheld the four men approaching him he stood up and waded out towards them, shouting greetings and friendly insults. Sergio, who did not know him very well, was astonished when Don Emmanuel stopped, raised a leg like a dog, farted, and told him, ‘Replace your hat, cabron, or I will piss in it. If there is one thing I cannot tolerate, it is respect.’
Sergio hastily replaced his sombrero and Misael remarked, ‘Don Emmanuel, your paloma grows more huge and battle-torn by the day. It is said you borrow it from your donkey.’
‘On the contrary, my burro borrows it from me,’ replied Don Emmanuel. ‘I swear by the Virgin these women of yours have chuchas such as to stretch any man by suction. When I die I shall need two coffins.’
‘Leave it to me in your will,’ said Josef, ‘and I’ll dry it in the sun for a bullwhip.’
‘Indeed, you will do no such thing, for I believe you would use it on your wife!’
‘His wife would no doubt use it on herself,’ exclaimed Misael.
‘Then she will by God’s grace leave me alone,’ said Josef.
After many more such inoffensive pleasantries, in which Hectoro was too proud and too dignified to participate, he informed Don Emmanuel of Dona Constanza’s project, and was told, ‘I’ll stop it or by God I swear I will only pleasure pigs for the rest of my life. Before you go you must witness my new method of taming goats.’
They followed him to the caracolee tree where a large yellow-eyed and hostile billy-goat was absent-mindedly mowing the grass in a circle. Don Emmanuel went down on his knees and shook his head at the animal, which lowered its own and feinted with its horns. ‘Whooba!’ yelled Don Emmanuel, and butted it hard between the eyes. He then clasped it around the neck and kissed it lovingly on the nose. ‘There!’ he said proudly.
‘He is not at all like a gringo,’ commented Sergio as they walked back to the pueblo.
‘That is because he is not a gringo,’ replied Hectoro. ‘He is an Ingles.’
‘England must be a fine country then,’ said Misael. ‘I would go to it if anyone knew where it was.’
‘Don Emmanuel knows,’ said Josef.
‘Not any more,’ said Hectoro, so enigmatically that the others did not dare to ask him what he meant.
5
* * *
REMEDIOS AND THE PISTACOS
THE INDIANS OF the Andes believe in the existence of angels of death who have white skin and who cut people into little pieces. Nobody knows precisely why they believe in these ‘pistacos’, but it is commonly assumed that it is a legacy of the civilising influence of the Spanish conquistadores and the enlightened activities of the Inquisition. It is still dangerous for the white man to go into some parts of the Cordillera, not just because of the ladrones, the robbers, but because of cases of mistaken identity where public-spirited cholos think that they are bravely destroying pistacos to the greater benefit of mankind.
Remedios, when she was a little child with a round belly – earning her the nickname ‘Barrigona’ – and two little black plaits and big round eyes, was already a materialist. She did not believe in God, or spirits, or pistacos. When she grew older she still did not believe in God, or spirits, but she knew for certain that the pistacos were real, and that their existence was not a superstition, for she had seen them with her own eyes.
She did not believe in the spirits of the earth, the rocks, the waters, the forests and the valleys, to whom one offered a little piece of whatever one was eating, saying, ‘Take, eat, so that you do not eat me.’ She did not believe that if you fell over running you had to wrap yourself hastily in your skirt so that you did not fall pregnant to the earth spirit. Nor when she fell over did she believe that you had to place a little earth in your mouth so that you ate the spirit before it could eat you. Nor did she believe that the spirits could melt you down to use for tallow. But she did come to believe in pistacos.
Remedios’ mother was a Bracamoros Indian whom her f
ather had met when he was a migrant worker on a hydroelectric project in the Montana, and who blackened her teeth for greater beauty. Remedios, defying all laws of heredity and probability, accepted neither her mother’s animism nor her father’s ardent Catholicism, and believed only in what she could see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Her parents’ constant disagreements about her metaphysical upbringing ensured that she was simply a humanist who read small children’s books concealed in a breviary whenever she was forced to go to church.
When the violence started, Remedios was four years old and mainly interested in cakes, playing in the gutter, and poking at dog excrement with sticks. When the violence reached the little town of La Cuenca, she was seven years old, still interested in cakes, but even more interested in climbing trees.
The violence was the first spasm in a civil war that has never truly ended because no one ever understood why it had begun. It is possible to trace its origins in the manner of a historian; but not without becoming confused.
In 1946 a Conservative government came to power after a thirty-year rule by the Liberals. In the next year the charismatic leader of the Liberals, Ignacio Menendez, made a famous speech indicting the government of fifty-six acts of violence in eleven provinces. In the year after that he made an even more famous speech, known as the ‘Oracion’, in which he appealed for peace.
It is hard to understand why the Liberals and the Conservatives were such bitter rivals and why they expended so much hatred on each other, since both parties consisted of oligarchs and had exactly the same politics. But be that as it may, the terrible spark that blew the powder keg occurred during the Pan-American Conference when Mr Marshall, Mr Harrison, and General Ridgway had arrived to announce that they were worried about revolution but could not spare any money, and Fidel Castro was also in the city to attend a student anti-imperialist congress. Senor Menendez was walking through a crowd, genially shaking hands and receiving the good wishes of supporters when someone stepped up and shot him. A man selling tickets for one of the plague of lotteries that are a national institution rushed up to grapple with the assassin, his tickets flying off in the wind. Another man ran out of a restaurant with a chair and smashed it over the assassin’s head, and then the crowd kicked him to death, so that afterwards no one was able to tell who the man was, he was so disfigured. Almost immediately mobs began to sack the city. They incendiarised the United States Embassy, public buildings, the Capitol (where the conference was taking place), and looted the shops. Secretary of State Marshall and the British Ambassador blamed the Communists, which does not explain why the Communists were as surprised and confused by it as everyone else, and totally unprepared. The leader of the Communist Party spent the two days of the rioting under a desk at the offices of a liberal newspaper, and displayed the Communists’ traditional reluctance to become involved in revolutions, preferring to plot ones that never happen. The hypothesis of Secretary of State Marshall also does not explain why the rioting ended as soon as the Conservatives agreed to accept some Liberals into the cabinet.
Then there began the violence, and the Liberals refused to participate in the next election, for reasons that will be forever opaque, so that the Conservatives were elected unopposed.
The violence grew apace. Guerrillero bands of peasant Liberals and Conservatives reduced the countryside to a desert of desolation, and the Communists, not wishing to be left out or to appear non-conformist, dabbled in violence now and then as though to get in practice for the eventual revolution. During the next election the Communists, greatly reduced in number owing to the rise of Menendezismo, still managed to split the Liberal Party by telling their own members to vote for a dissident right-wing Liberal who had once been a Communist. Because of the split, the Conservatives were re-elected on forty per cent of the vote. Then the Communists, having denounced the Liberals as fascists, swung round and supported them.
If we attempt to simplify our way through the extraordinary complexities of the civil war that followed, we arrive at something like the following account.
Liberals and Conservatives massacred each other. The Communists expounded theories, made speeches and published pamphlets, and then decided to organise the peasants, including women and children, into ‘battalions’. Communist peasants declared an independent republic in Viola, which was so successful that it became rich and prosperous, so the Communist Party denounced it for ‘bourgeoisification’. The Liberals and Conservatives continued to massacre each other. The Liberals were hoping to force a military coup, and the Conservatives hoped to keep the president in power. The Communists tried to unite the left wing, a project which has never been found to be possible in any country of the world at any time with the single exception of Cuba. They did, however, succeed in extracting a statement of anti-imperialist and antilatifundist intent from the otherwise futile meetings.
A new independent republic of Menendeziana was founded in the north of the country, and to it there flocked Liberals, Conservatives, Catholics, Protestants, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, all looking for a little peace. They were all allowed in and left in peace provided they called themselves ‘Conservative Communists’, ‘Catholic Communists’, and so on. The new republic was so successful and became so prosperous that the Communists condemned it. It became so independent that its president once wrote to the real president protesting against border violations and threatening to break off diplomatic relations.
Then General Panela, known as ‘El Azucar’, deposed the Conservatives in a coup, and declared an amnesty for all guerrillas. The Liberals and Conservatives laid down their arms, and the Communists, grasping the opportunity to be in the limelight at last, decided to become seriously involved in guerrilla warfare, but did very little.
Panela could not prevent the general violence from continuing, however, because the relatives of those killed in the violence began to take revenge, and a plague of blood-feuds arose. Additionally, the Liberals and Conservatives began to suspect Panela of being left wing, and formed a coalition supported by the Roman Catholic Church to get rid of him. The former enemies-to-the-death announced a perpetual coalition government where the presidency and all official posts were alternated between Conservatives and Liberals every four years. They organised a rigged plebiscite to ratify the arrangement, and won it by two and a half million votes. In this way the oligarchy finally arrived at the perfect formula for democracy within the oligarchy. Together, the new democratic government turned on the former allies of the Liberals, the Communists, and continued the civil war ad infinitum, concentrating especially on breaking up the (by now) nine independent republics. The Communists beat a tactical retreat into the mountains, to continue their ‘armed propaganda’ from a point of safety. In point of fact the Communist Party renounced revolutionary violence on the grounds that ‘the historical conditions are not yet fulfilled’ and went back to making involved speeches, publishing pamphlets and plotting revolutions that will never happen – or if they do, certainly not under their leadership, which does not exist except nominally. This means that the Communists still fighting in the hills are non-communist Communists.
All this is history, but it does not do justice to the reality of the times in terms of the demonic wind of brutality and inhumanity that scoured the bodies and souls of innocent and guilty alike. It was as if some demented Qliphothic force had escaped from the gates of hell to ravage every last morsel of decency out of its last hiding place. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ceded precedence to the Beast, the Mega Therion, which visited such inconceivable havoc upon the lives of the people that when it was finished La Violencia had claimed over two hundred thousand of them. It is hard not to believe with hindsight that an infectious morbidity of the soul had contaminated the whole nation with an insanity of bloodlust thinly disguised as ideology and moral stance. There was a spreading sickness of ethical depravity that blew apart the eternal calm of the countryside and covered everything with a sticky slime of obscenity, viciousness, barbar
ity and pointless cataclysm.
The first thing that the band of guerrilleros (no one knew whether they were Conservative or Liberal) did when they marched into La Cuenca was mass-rape all the little girls in the primary school. This had become a commonplace, but it was the first and, to date, the last time that Remedios ever had congress with a man.
Torn and bleeding, the little Remedios lurched her way home clutching on to walls and fences, her eyes filled with tears, her face smeared, her clothes torn, and her brain whirling with incomprehension. When she arrived home the door was ajar and there was a terrible screaming coming from inside. She stood on an empty paint-pot and watched through the window as her parents were skilfully murdered.
During La Violencia human intelligence reached new heights of ingenuity and sophistication. Brand new methods of scalping, beheading, disembowelling and quartering were improvised and perfected by empirical experimentation and assiduous practice. A complex technical vocabulary grew up around this new science: the ‘corte de corbata’, ‘corte de mica’, ‘corte de franela’, etc.
Remedios watched catatonically as her papa was subjected to ‘picar para tamal’, a technique involving slow death by having one’s body cut into minute pieces in such a manner and pattern that one did not die until perfectly shredded.