The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts Read Free Page A

muscles, or a mestizo, and see how Hugh likes that! Really the pool is an abomination; one could die of cholera like Tchaikovsky. Juanito would have been a fine lover if you saw him petting the horses. A man who has a way with animals has a way with a woman, so they say. Perhaps it was Beethoven.’ She parted her legs and dried herself there with more application than she had intended. ‘By the Virgin, I must be more careful with myself or I shall be burned away! I must find a new groom. Truly life is one hurdle after another, for it appears we are not born to happiness in this world. I wonder if it was typhus. I hear that there is such a thing as spontaneous combustion. It would be fortunate if there were a man or a maid with a bucket of water nearby. They say the fragment went through Juanito’s temple and destroyed his brain inside his head.’ She put a dainty foot on the mahogany chair to dry between the toes, looked up through the window (consisting in fact of fine anti-mosquito mesh, for even the Evanses were not stupid enough to have glass windows in such a climate), and admired the hundred or so pedigree horses of different varieties which grazed in the field. She was trying to spot her finest palomino when it occurred to her that she could divert the Mula. ‘I will dig a channel towards the purification plant from the river, and I will install some kind of gate to lower into the water so that it flows down the channel when it is required to do so. Moreover, I will not tell Hugh, or he will invent some reason to prevent it. I will pretend that it is a present to him for his birthday, and in this way when I go to New York I will not have to spend my allowance on a gift.’
    Dona Constanza pouted alluringly to herself in the mirrorand thought suddenly of Juanito. A twinge of sadness and regret passed simultaneously behind her eyes and through her heart. But then she drew herself up and breathed deeply inwards, and the traces of the sixteen-year-old she once had been vanished from her face as the mantle of cold dignity settled itself about her. When she had dressed she emerged for breakfast every inch the Spanish aristocrat.
    There were in that country, as in all those troubled countries, only four social groups to speak of. At the bottom of the social scale were the fourteen million Negroes who were directly descended from thirteen hundred slaves imported by the conquistadores to build the giant fortress of Nueva Sevilla after they had discovered that Indians made very inadequate slaves. They would not give up their gods and preferred to starve themselves to death rather than submit to indignity. The Negroes on the other hand, being from different parts of West Africa, had no common language, so it was a simple matter to confuse them and to brutalise them into being enlightened by Christianity. It is, after all, a consolation for present hell when one is promised future heaven, and their irrepressible humour and stoicism, along with their magnificent physiques and stature, enabled them to labour prodigiously under the whip and the brand. When the fortress was complete, and its dungeons well stocked with English pirates with royal patents from Queen Elizabeth, the slaves were released to fend for themselves. From these humble beginnings they emerged eventually as campesinos, the indispensable providers of nourishment for the entire nation. Consequently they were the poorest of all people and the most despised, even by themselves. Those who took to the favelas, the barrios, and the innumerable shanty-towns were driven by poverty and disease to theft, extortion, prostitution, violence and drink, and were therefore even more comprehensively reviled than the peasants, their brothers.
    Existing in a world almost wholly unrelated to that of all other classes were the Indians. One half of them, the Incas, lived almost exclusively at altitudes greater than two thousandmetres. At all such altitudes they reckoned, accurately,