There were no tables brought out, laden with food. There were no civil authorities declaring a fiesta, no gentle priest offering the use of the church, no pious widows kneeling to ask his blessing. There would be no impressive trials and executions, no women to violate and lacerate, no apocalyptic sermons, and no laying to waste and looting. There would be only the cold of the night and the long nothingness of day. A collective sigh of disappointment blew through their hearts, because before them lay only an impossibility, and behind them lay a retreat that would be nothing but a greater hardship.
As they stood before that monolithic wall they saw people begin to emerge from behind it and walk along the top, all of them women. They were Dolores and Consuelo, together with all the other whores of the town, who had arrived to do nothing other than to mock them in their misery. Dressed in their finest and richest clothes they paraded back and forth, swinging their hips and pulling ugly faces at them, as do schoolchildren. They stuck their middle fingers in the air in a graphic imitation of copulation, they thumbed their noses and protruded their tongues, and at the top of their lungs they yelled out obscene invitations and insults. ‘Vamos, Commadres!’ called Dolores, and all in a line they raised their skirts and displayed their unclothed nether parts to the infuriated and humiliated crusaders.
Suddenly there was a commotion as Felicidad joined her erstwhile sisters-in-arms. In front of them all she too paraded, caressing her own breasts lasciviously, licking her lips with her sly little tongue in a breathtaking display of what delights could be perpetrated by them. She stood sideways, flung back her long black hair, and pouted in a delicious caricature of the pose of models on the covers of men’s magazines. She ran her hands up her legs, raising her hems to just that point where one yearns for more, and she blew sarcastic and contemptuous kisses with such salacious virtuosity that every man who watched her declared that they had shrunk back into their own souls as a snail seeks its carapace.
Felicidad turned her back on the warriors and priests, and it was as though, in the eclipse of her dark and vibrant beauty, the sun had left the heavens and the stars been extinguished. But she inched her skirts upwards with the coy expertise of a stripper, and stuck out her backside. It was the most rounded, most pert, most exquisite, most honey-coloured, most naked and velvet backside in the history of the world, and she was revolving it slowly, dipping with it, stroking it with her slender hands, looking backwards over her shoulder with an expression of desire so absolute that it could have melted candles and ignited tapers in every nunnery in the land.
One crusader felt his mouth go dry. ‘My God, she is a furnace,’ he said, with awe in his voice, ‘I could leap into that and die.’
But Mgr Rechin Anquilar could no longer withstand the cruelty of that vision of an unobtainable but demoniac paradise. Furious with mortification, the honour of his manhood and the dignity and prestige of his station mortally offended, he grabbed the rifle of a man near by, raised it to his shoulder, and fired.
He missed, but the first shot of the war had been fired in Cochadebajo de los Gatos, and nothing could now recall it or prevent the conflagration.
58 The Council Of War And The Cripple’s Atonement
THE COUNCIL OF war was convened in the whorehouse on the same evening as Felicidad’s adorable backside had narrowly escaped a horrible fate. ‘They cannot send me out to infect everyone with clap, now,’ she said, ‘because in the first place I no longer have it, and in the second place I would be shot by the man who looks like a vulture, and in the third place I do not trust Don Emmanuel to be good whilst I am away. So I am staying behind this wall.’
Hectoro stroked his conquistador beard and said, ‘We still have the two machine guns that we took from the Army. We should go up on the wall and blow away their balls, just like this.’ He raised his hand and clicked his thumb and forefinger.
Dolores placed her glass upon the table so emphatically that some of the rum spilled upon it. ‘You stupid men used up all the ammunition during the grand candomble and the fiesta aferwards. You took them up on the mountain and you were firing like madmen at nothing.’ She spat onto the ground to indicate the immaturity and irresponsibility of men in general.
Hectoro looked at her and replied, ‘A woman’s opinion is of no account.’ He saw Remedios glowering at him, and added, ‘Unless she is Remedios, who is as good as any man.’
Misael passed his hand over his brow, and said with resignation in his voice, ‘The fact is, compañeros, that we have very little ammunition of any kind. We used up most of it when we first arrived and were obliged to go hunting for meat, and we have never replaced it. We will have to be very careful of that which we have.’
‘Where are General Fuerte and Capitan Papagato?’ asked Remedios. ‘Since they were soldiers, their advice would be valuable. Would someone like to fetch them?’
Pedro the Hunter rose from his seat. ‘I will fetch them,’ he said, very seriously, and in this way he showed Hectoro that it does not demean a man to pay attention to a woman. So great was his height, such a witness to his prowess were the animal skins in which he dressed, and so powerful was his dignity, that not even Hectoro would have questioned or ridiculed anything that he did.
‘I have a request,’ continued Remedios, as Pedro left the whorehouse. ‘I would like no one to mention to the Conde Pompeyo that those maniacs are the Inquisition. The very mention of the word makes him pale, since he remembers their confiscations and inescapable accusations from his own time. For his sake, I would like everyone to refer to them as ‘the English’, and then he will be as brave as a lion.’
‘The English,’ repeated the company, rolling the phrase ‘Los Ingleses’ around their mouths until it sounded familiar and applicable.
‘What are we to do to beat the English then, compañeros?’ asked Consuelo the whore in her smoky voice.
‘We should charge out and slice them to pieces with our machetes,’ said Hectoro.
‘We should leave them alone until they starve, despair, and go home,’ said Misael. ‘They cannot get to us, and we have food from the plateau which we can bring up in the apparatus. There is no problem.’
Everybody nodded their heads and looked pleased with this strategy, since it required no effort and would disrupt no siestas. But Remedios shook her head so vigorously that she seemed to be flagellating her own face with her long and heavy ponytail. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘do you remember how we poisoned the Army in Chiriguana by leaving dead animals upstream in the river Mula? And Don Emmanuel told us to piss and shit in it, so that they all fell ill? Sooner or later these people would think of doing the same thing to us, and therefore we have to drive them away.’
‘And also,’ added Hectoro, ‘there would be no justice in it and no satisfaction for us if we were to leave them alone.’
‘We could merely abandon the town and go back to live on the plain where we were before, now that there is no danger there. We could move everything down in the apparatus of Profesor Luis, and when we are all down we could cut the ropes of the apparatus so that we could not be followed. In this way there would be no bloodshed, we could all go home as many of us have wanted to do, and the English would be left with nothing.’ It was Misael who spoke, his gold tooth still blackened and making it appear as though he was missing a tooth entirely. ‘We could work for Don Emmanuel and Doña Constanza as before, and everything would go in a big circle.’
‘Doña Constanza would not like to return to her husband when she has a lover in Gonzago,’ said Remedios.
‘And besides, the plains are too hot, and everything happens by exaggeration,’ said Hectoro. ‘When it rains we are in a lake, and when it is dry we live in dust. Our crops are uncertain, there are coral snakes and vipers, sometimes it is so hot that we have to sit in the river all through siesta, and besides, the life here is good. We have a plateau that suffers no extremes, and here it is always the same temperature at noon. I for one do not want to leave, especially when it is consid
ered that our former home has grown wild and is beneath the mud, as we were told by those who brought the tractors. We would have to start all over again.’
‘Besides,’ said Remedios, nodding in agreement, ‘it is a matter of principle that we should believe what we want and live as we please. I for one did not fight for years with the People’s Vanguard in order to end as one of the oppressed. Liberty or death!’
This vehement outburst drew a round of applause from all the customers and inmates of the brothel. Hectoro rose to his feet and proclaimed, ‘Remedios has balls. Viva Remedios!’ He sat down heavily, disconcerted by his own unusual lack of reticence.
General Fuerte and Capitan Papagato entered with Pedro, and sat down at the table on either side of the shade of Josef, who, ever since his untimely death, had emerged from the floor at precisely the same time every evening to sit motionless at the table where in life he had flirted with the girls, become helplessly drunk, and played at cards.
‘What are we to do?’ asked the General.
‘We were hoping that you would tell us that,’ remarked Remedios, raising an eyebrow in order to indicate disappointed expectation.
‘It seems to me,’ said the General, ‘that no conflict can be won against a side that believes in what it is fighting for and whose morale is consequently high. We must find ways to demoralise them entirely, and to convince them that there is no recourse but retreat or surrender. At this point our tactics should be like guerrilla warfare, a stab here, a pinprick there. And whilst we are doing that, we can think up a grand strategy. We should not repeat the heroic mistakes of the Chaco War, or the Spanish Civil War, by charging out in frontal assaults.
‘There is one problem,’ said Capitan Papagato, ‘which is that the wall keeps us from them just as it keeps them from us. It limits what we can accomplish.’
‘The General is right,’ said Remedios, ‘as is the Capitan. I had not thought before that the wall would be a difficulty for us.’
Misael clapped his hands and stood up. ‘I have the answer, compañeros. Who is the one who knows about pinpricks and annoyance? Who is the one who dreams up schemes to infuriate, and makes us all laugh? Who gave songs to the Mexican musicologist that turned out to be filthy, so that he received a rude letter from his agent in Mexico City?’ He raised his glass: ‘Viva Don Emmanuel! With his help we will defeat the English.’
‘We will consult him tomorrow,’ said Remedios. ‘Who is keeping watch on the wall?’
‘Antoine the Frenchman, the Mexican, and Doña Constanza,’ answered Pedro.
‘I hope that she is not with Gonzago, then,’ said Misael. ‘Because if she is, she will not be watching, but will be finding other ways of making love.’
During this discussion amongst some of the natural leaders of the community, a small drama was enacting itself, unknown to all except the protagonist and his victims.
He found himself a stretch of the wall in between Antoine’s position and that of Doña Constanza, fixed a rope to an iron hoop, checked that his knife was secure in his belt, and let himself down into the icy waters of the moat. He clenched his teeth against the freezing of his muscles, felt a cramp coming on in his lame leg, and struck out for the opposite side, swimming with his arms and his one strong leg. He scrambled out of the water, sat there shivering with his arms wrapped about his knees, and thought about going back. He looked up at the stars and remembered the dream in which he and Sibila had been brought briefly together in Ancient Greece. He recalled the appalling spectacle of her martyrdom and the disaster of his dismal cowardice, and thought that he saw her face reflected in the tears that gathered in his hands. He kissed the reflection and tasted salt. ‘If there is nothing hereafter,’ he promised her, ‘then soon I will be with you in nothingness, and if there is heaven I will be with you there, and perhaps my leg will be healed, and you will forgive me.’
He crept towards the encampment of the crusaders, crouching down so that he could crawl, using his two hands as legs so that he could drag his helpless limb behind him. Panting, he watched the activity between the glow of the fires, and determined that the vulture’s tent was the one in the middle. He understood suddenly that subterfuge would make him only more noticeable, and he stood up.
‘I will walk like a normal man,’ he told himself, and slowly he began to move towards the large tent where Mgr Rechin Anquilar held court to his priests, robed himself in purple for his judgements, and slept at night. ‘Hola, cabrón,’ he called to a man who was sitting by a fire, ‘do you have a cigarette?’
‘I have only three left in this godforsaken place,’ replied the man.
‘I will not trouble you then.’
Ambling so as not to betray his disability, he circled ever closer to his prey. He stopped suddenly with disappointment when he saw that outside the tent a man was standing guard. But then he continued to walk so as not to arouse suspicion of his motives. He made as if to go by the guard, but then turned, as with an afterthought. Remembering the last man’s words, he asked, ‘Do you have a cigarette in this godforsaken place?’
The man put a finger to his lips and pointed towards the tent to indicate that he should keep down his voice since the Monsignor was inside. The cripple came closer and leaned forward as if to repeat his request more quietly, but instead his hand lunged up from below and sent the curving blade of the knife up behind the ribs and through the heart.
The man crumpled sideways, clutching himself as though he had been punched, and the cripple threw open the flaps of the tent. The darkness inside it blinded him, and his confusion and fear paralysed him for a second as he understood that he had no idea where to strike. But the unmistakable croak of the Monsignor’s voice came from one side, saying, ‘Who is it? Valentino, is that you?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, attempting from memory to imitate the voice of the priest that he had considered a simpleton. ‘Where are you? I cannot see in here.’
‘Over here,’ said the Monsignor, fumbling for a box of matches to light the lamp by his bed.
In the flaring of the match the intended victim looked up and saw a mutilated face that was familiar but forgotten. The two men held each other’s eyes for a second, and then the Monsignor beheld the knife that was plainly dripping with blood. The Monsignor leapt from his bed, took hold of a pillow, and cringed away in the hope of fending off the knife thrusts with it.
He found that his eyes could now see in the tenebrous damp of the tent, and he clutched the knife in his hand more tightly. ‘Do you remember Sibila?’ he asked.
‘Sibila?’
‘The one you tortured and burned, remember?’
‘How should I remember?’
‘O yes, there were so many, after all.’ He advanced with his knife until he was almost upon his victim. The Monsignor knew all at once the infinite terror of impending death, and his eyes rolled as he averted his head, whimpered, and pushed out the pillow to defend himself. He felt his guts churning and his bladder weaken.
But the cripple forgot his disability in the palpable bliss of consummated hatred and just revenge. He moved to dart forward, and fell.
The Monsignor threw down the pillow and broke from his tent. ‘Assassin, assassin,’ he shouted. In the tent the cripple rose to his knees, and more tears welled up from the immeasurable lagoon of the sadness that had begun as disgust at his own lameness, continued as the guilt of culpable dread, and now ended as abject failure. As the crusaders ran into the tent he looked upward to a heaven that may contain Sibila somewhere in its placid embrace, and cut his own throat.
59 In Which Dionisio Humanely Miscalculates
THEY FOUND DON Emmanuel stark naked in his house, singing a beautiful Irish tune to the Mexican musicologist, who, having had his fingers burned before, was now sceptical of the provenance of most of Don Emmanuel’s musical contributions. ‘I will write down the name,’ said Don Emmanuel, ‘and you can check for yourself, It is called ‘The London Derrière’, see?’
‘But Lo
ndon is in England, so how can this tune be Irish? And furthermore, I know that “derrière” means “backside” in French.’
‘In English it means “Irishman”,’ asserted Don Emmanuel, feigning impatience and indignation. ‘London is full of Irishmen. In fact it was constructed almost entirely by them, and all Englishmen have Irish blood. It is nothing suspicious.’
‘Do not trust him,’ advised Misael. ‘He is worse than a drunk for false promises.’ He turned to address Don Emmanuel, and indicated the others who had accompanied him. ‘We have come for advice.’
Don Emmanuel grinned, scratched his rufous beard and then his pubic region, and said, ‘I will give you all the advice in the world if only you can tell me why it is that the dingleberries excavated from my navel by Felicidad are always composed of blue fluff, when I possess no clothes of that colour.’
‘This is strange,’ said Misael, ‘because truly I have found the same thing. Perhaps it is for the same reason that all vomit contains tomato skins even when none have been eaten.’
Don Emmanuel raised his finger in the air with an expression of enlightenment upon his face. ‘Indeed you are very wise, for that must be it. Now what advice do you need?’
‘We would like you to tell us some annoyances to inflict on the crusaders,’ said Remedios, ‘whilst we think of a strategy.’
‘The best way to irritate those who are having a bad time is to have a good time oneself,’ said Don Emmanuel. ‘Having a good time is always the best way to annoy priests in any case. It horrifies them, unless they are Father Garcia or Don Salvador. We should hold a fiesta, and that is my first advice. My second advice is that perhaps we should use the same tactic as we did with the army in Chiriguana. Hectoro and Pedro should go out each night and kill the guards.’
Hectoro and Pedro exchanged fearful glances, and Pedro coughed nervously into his hand. ‘Forgive me, compañeros, but neither of us can swim, and we would drown in the moat. To tell the truth, water is the one thing that scares me. Otherwise I would go and kill all of them.’