The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts by Louis De Bernières Page A

of his carbine down on the man’s foot and the soldier hopped up and down clutching it. ‘I am sorry Comandante,’ he said in an aggrieved and sulky voice. ‘It’s what we usually do.’
    ‘Infamy!’ bellowed Figueras with a wild glare in his eyes, which had more than a tinge of desperation in them. He turned to Dona Constanza, bowing and clicking his heels. ‘I apologise profusely, Senora,’ he said, and a little bead of perspiration ran down his temple and disappeared down into his collar. ‘However, I must ask you again, where are the Communists?’
    ‘There aren’t any,’ she said. ‘The army came in and killed a lot of people some time ago, including Juanito, who was my stable-man. They were supposed to be Communists but I have my doubts. What do Communists look like?’
    Figueras wondered for a second if she was trying to be funny or was genuinely stupid. ‘Senora, we have received reports of gun battles and explosions in this vicinity.’
    ‘Then the reports are mistaken,’ she replied. ‘There have been no such thing.’
    ‘Nonetheless we are obliged to investigate. May we please set up our camp on your property? I assure you there will be no damage.’
    ‘Indeed there will not,’ she replied tartly, ‘or the governor will hear of it – I also know General Fuerte. You may use the field nearest the pueblo, and I will be obliged if you do not disturb the horses. They are most valuable.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ said the Lieutenant as they walked away, ‘she is in league with the Communists.’
    ‘She is an oligarch, and oligarchs are not Communists.’
    ‘Camilo Torres was an oligarch,’ said the Lieutenant.’
    ‘Camilo Torres was a priest,’ replied Figueras.
    ‘Then perhaps she is afraid?’
    ‘Somehow I doubt it,’ said Figueras, with feeling. ‘Lieutenant, take four armed men and question the people in the pueblo. You must return by dusk and report to me directly.’
    The Lieutenant saluted with his usual lazy wave of the hand and departed shortly afterwards with a corporal and three nervous conscripts, all of whom had bayonets fixed and twitching trigger-fingers. They were startled twice by vultures, once by a steer, and once by a scarecrow in the maize field, which was holding a branch fashioned into the shape of a gun, so that by the time they reached the village, in which nothing was happening at all, they were all in urgent need of refreshment. The Lieutenant ordered them to search house-to-house and to ask questions; he himself went to the bar at the further end and drank two Inca-Colas and an Aguila. His men searched principally in the brothels and satisfied themselves that there were no terrorists even in the orifices of the whores, reporting back to the Lieutenant that, when asked if there were any armed ruffians in the district, they invariably received the reply ‘Ustedes solo’, or ‘Only yourselves’. They also reported that that very evening there began a two-day fiesta, a thing irresistible to any true-born patriot. This convinced them that there could not possibly be any guerrillas in the area, and it also convinced Figueras when they reported it back to him, so that he immediately ordered himself and all his men to attend it, for the sake of ‘enhancing public relations’.
    The fiesta had been invented twenty years before by villagers anxious to commemorate the foundation of the community. As nobody knew when this had been, a brujo had been consulted who, by means of sacred herbs steeped in ron cana in the trepanned skull of a murderer, drunk by a clairvoyant mulatta, had established the exact date and the fact that it had taken place in the afternoon. The pueblo was three hundred and twenty-one years old.
    Towards five o’clock in the evening there began a steady influx of campesinos from the surrounding countryside, all ofthem bearing machetes in leather-tasselled scabbards at their side. This was by no means a signal of hostile intent, for it is unknown for any