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

that almost no one would bother to come and look for them. Thus they lived peacefully in their carefully built grass huts, tending their terraces, chewing coca leaves, worshipping Pachacamac, and coming back to the plains solely in order to sell mochilas (their very practical and beautifully decorated carrying bags with a shoulder strap), and potatoes. If you were to see a particularly fine mule, it would always have with it a particularly fine Indian dressed in a white tunic, with a white domed hat set upright on a shining black head of hair. It was not so much their Mongolian features that impressed everyone, although these were both beautiful and impressive, but their sandals made from car tyres and the phenomenal muscularity of their calves. Most of them carried muskets in perfect working order which had been taken from the Spaniards centuries before, and on account of this, and because it was commonly said that all Indians had syphilis, everyone left them alone. The government was dimly aware that they were a species of national monument, and appointed officers to ensure their protection and preservation, who, fortunately, did nothing to earn their salaries. Thus the noble people lived on undisturbed, except by the not infrequent crashes of army helicopters, the inoffensive and almost unnoticeable visits of diffident anthropologists from Oxford and Cambridge, and the straggling parties of mountaineers with peeling noses and diarrhoea who also came for the most part, and perhaps curiously enough, from Britain. It should surprise no one if in two thousand years there are still Acahuatecs and Arahuacax sucking coca pounded with snail shells from their pestles at altitudes greater than seven thousand feet in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita; for they are a people who have learned by their own blood the wondrous disadvantages of an eventful history.
    The other half of the Indian population occupied the jungle regions below the foothills, and although the one population graduated into the other, they were quite different in appearance and way of life.
    Slightly above the Negros but not wholly so was the class of mestizos and mulattos. These people of different racial mix were perhaps physically the most surprising of all the peoples in that land for whilst they all possessed the broadish nose and frizzy hair of the Negro, sometimes the hair was blonde, or ginger, and sometimes the eyes were blue, or green, or amber. Their skins were pale yellow, and most faces would have one or two dark brown beauty spots. Perhaps some of them were sallow-complexioned thanks to the many preparations one could buy for whitening the skin, for in lands where power is not in the hands of the majority, the masses invariably adopt the snobberies and prejudices of the rulers, as if to say, ‘Look, I am not one of the oppressed; I, too, am superior.’ From the mestizo class was being born an embryonic petit bourgeoisie who lived in the suburbs of the bigger towns, who bought televisions which received only the confused flickerings of the transmitters in the capital. The signal, having been bounced from peak to peak over hundreds of miles so that all the wavelengths were cancelled out by interfering with themselves, would arrive at sets powered by anything between one hundred and three hundred volts, depending upon the vagaries of the public generating system or their own generators. One could walk down the streets of Valledupar at night and see through the windows mestizo families peering intently at the bright square of leaping and buzzing lines and spots as though they were interpreting runes or the flight of birds. When by some freak of atmospheric conditions a picture appeared or a line of speech was discernible, there would follow a minute of animated discussion and comment from the family and the mother and the oldest sister would come in from the kitchen, and then they would return, leaving the family to gaze hypnotised once more by the