The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts Read Free

‘Vamos!’ he said to his men, and they filed out, almost apologetically. Farides turned on her side and whimpered until Consuelo the whore came in and covered her with a blanket and whispered words of comfort to her.
    The jeeps roared away into the night, scattering the chickensand raising a plume of dust. A shocked and indignant knot of people gathered in the street, and Farides emerged trembling, wrapped in her blanket. Shyly she kissed Hectoro and Pedro on the cheek, and then knelt down and cupped Profesor Luis’ head whilst somebody fetched some water.
    One kilometre down the road, Capitan Rodrigo Figueras ordered his driver to stop and took something from a box on the back of the jeep. As he had been trained by the gringos in Panama, he slunk swiftly and noiselessly back along the track. He circled the huts through a maize field, and came out between two of the dwellings just next to the knot of people. He drew a pin from the grenade and lobbed it spinning into the crowd before he ducked away.
    Three days later, the national radio issued a broadcast:
    ‘Three days ago a unit of government troops near Asuncion in Cesar surprised a group of communist insurgents and killed five of them, wounding twenty in a brief engagement. No troops were killed, and Capitan Rodrigo Figueras has been promoted to comandante and recommended for decoration. General Carlo Maria Fuerte, military commander in the area, said in an interview this morning that he and all units under him were deeply committed to, and would continue, the fight against the Cuba-led communist conspiracy to terrorise the free people of this country and subvert their liberties.’
    It was on that same night that Federico, the fourteen-year-old who had shot the vulture for Profesor Luis, got out of his hammock at two o’clock in the morning, stole his father’s rifle and two boxes of shells and disappeared somewhere in the foothills that are neither quite in one country nor in its neighbour.

2
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IN WHICH DONA CONSTANZA EVANS RESOLVES TO SAVE THE SWIMMING POOL FROM DROUGHT
    DONA CONSTANZA EVANS, having risen from her silken sheets at ten o’clock when the air-conditioning had finally lost the daily battle against the heat and humidity of the equatorial morning, took a cool shower in water from her own purification plant, and towelled herself dry before the mirror. She possessed the gift of all spoiled women, that of being able to follow several inconsequential trains of thought simultaneously and to believe them all to be of incalculable importance. Thus she inspected her forty-year-old body according to the habit she had followed since puberty, and thought about the recent exploits of the army in the village, in which her groom had been killed by a fragment of grenade. She thought also of the problem of the swimming pool, which lost half its water, turned green with algae, and became full of grateful frogs during every dry season.
    ‘I do not know how I am expected to exercise in such a pool,’ she thought as she raised a plump but unprepossessing breast in order to dry beneath it. ‘It is long since I saw my navel unconcealed by this terrible fat – it is the price of children, and little good they do you at birth or after.’ As she dabbed at her face she paused suddenly: ‘Next time I am in the Estados Unidos I will make enquiries of operations so that I may be as young as I please. I had no idea Juanito was a communist. Iwonder if my two children caused my passage to expand – perhaps that is why Hugh no longer demands his rights of me at night. Still, if the army say he was a communist then he was a communist and he should have been killed as he was. No doubt Hugh has taken a woman – probably a campesina whore, they are all sluts. The army, after all, is trained by the yanquis, and so no doubt they know their job. I swear the skin of my thighs is becoming coarser. I should take a campesino lover, for preference a big shiny black Negro with