Read Online The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts by Louis De Bernières - Free Book Online
Authors: Louis De Bernières
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wanted for his country; good highways, a good diet, a car for everyone, new hospitals, political stability. He had been to the USA and found the people decent, honourable and hospitable, and he therefore dismissed as irritatingly crass propaganda all the stories he had heard about CIA shenanigans, about the way that for every two pesos lent three pesos went out as interest, about US corporations sucking out the resources of the country. It did not seem to him at all credible.
What he did believe, however, was what he read in the newspapers, what he heard from high-ranking officers, government ministers and his acquaintances among the US military about what slavery the Communists wished to imposeupon the free world. And why should he not believe this? No one had ever given him any reasons to believe otherwise, and this leads us on to the second half of our twofold problem.
This was, that being a general removed him as a matter of course from the front line; that is, he had no reason not to believe in the literal truth of reports sent in by people such as Capitan Rodrigo Figueras. As far as he was concerned there was no evidence that such men were not strictly honourable and competent, and even if there were any evidence he always had to consider the possibility that it was Communist propaganda. He had been told that the Communists frequently murdered the peasants in order to blame it on the military. Additionally, coming as he did from a respectable family in Cucuta, he had seen the poverty and humiliation of others with his own eyes but never with his heart, as he had never experienced them himself. Consequently, he had no clear idea of the very personal reasons that guerrillas came up with for taking up arms.
Neither, as it happens, did the few Cuban agitators and military experts who had slipped into the country to infiltrate the labour movement and the bands of guerrillas. They came over with their heads full of ideals and theories about armed propaganda, the dictatorship of the proletariat, jungle tactics and the opiate of the masses, only to be baffled, amazed and disgusted by the guerrillas’ superstitions, unclarity of purpose, habit of going home for harvests and fiestas, inability (or rather, refusal) to organise, lack of interest in theory of any kind, and their odd reasons for fighting (the patron would not lend me fifty pesos, the patron shot my dog, in Venezuela they are paid better, I want to be able to go to France and they will not give me a passport because I have no birth certificate which means I have not yet been born and I want the right to be born). Most often, however, the guerrillas were fighting because some were too rich and everyone else too poor, and because they had become victims in some way of the Army’s random hooliganism. It was enough for them to know what they were fighting against; they did not need advice about what they were fighting for, or how to set about it.
General Carlo Maria Fuerte did at least know what he was fighting for, but today he was planning his leave, a very easy matter for him since he was in charge of all dispensations in the area. He was going to take a donkey, his military pack full of provisions, his service revolver for protection, his binoculars and his camera, to look for humming-birds in the Sierra. In his pocket, to put himself in the right mood, was a copy of Hudson’s
Idle Days in Patagonia.
7
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DON EMMANUEL’S INEFFECTIVE DIPLOMACY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
DON EMMANUEL MAY have been the obvious and logical choice as emissary to Dona Constanza, but he was a long way from being the best. This was because, ever since someone had told him in an ‘old-boy-just-a-word-in-your-ear’ manner that his Spanish was unacceptably vulgar, especially in his choice of adverbs, adjectives and common nouns, he had adopted a style of speech when talking to influential and respectable people which consisted partly of his customarily outrageous bluntness, and partly of
What he did believe, however, was what he read in the newspapers, what he heard from high-ranking officers, government ministers and his acquaintances among the US military about what slavery the Communists wished to imposeupon the free world. And why should he not believe this? No one had ever given him any reasons to believe otherwise, and this leads us on to the second half of our twofold problem.
This was, that being a general removed him as a matter of course from the front line; that is, he had no reason not to believe in the literal truth of reports sent in by people such as Capitan Rodrigo Figueras. As far as he was concerned there was no evidence that such men were not strictly honourable and competent, and even if there were any evidence he always had to consider the possibility that it was Communist propaganda. He had been told that the Communists frequently murdered the peasants in order to blame it on the military. Additionally, coming as he did from a respectable family in Cucuta, he had seen the poverty and humiliation of others with his own eyes but never with his heart, as he had never experienced them himself. Consequently, he had no clear idea of the very personal reasons that guerrillas came up with for taking up arms.
Neither, as it happens, did the few Cuban agitators and military experts who had slipped into the country to infiltrate the labour movement and the bands of guerrillas. They came over with their heads full of ideals and theories about armed propaganda, the dictatorship of the proletariat, jungle tactics and the opiate of the masses, only to be baffled, amazed and disgusted by the guerrillas’ superstitions, unclarity of purpose, habit of going home for harvests and fiestas, inability (or rather, refusal) to organise, lack of interest in theory of any kind, and their odd reasons for fighting (the patron would not lend me fifty pesos, the patron shot my dog, in Venezuela they are paid better, I want to be able to go to France and they will not give me a passport because I have no birth certificate which means I have not yet been born and I want the right to be born). Most often, however, the guerrillas were fighting because some were too rich and everyone else too poor, and because they had become victims in some way of the Army’s random hooliganism. It was enough for them to know what they were fighting against; they did not need advice about what they were fighting for, or how to set about it.
General Carlo Maria Fuerte did at least know what he was fighting for, but today he was planning his leave, a very easy matter for him since he was in charge of all dispensations in the area. He was going to take a donkey, his military pack full of provisions, his service revolver for protection, his binoculars and his camera, to look for humming-birds in the Sierra. In his pocket, to put himself in the right mood, was a copy of Hudson’s
Idle Days in Patagonia.
7
----
DON EMMANUEL’S INEFFECTIVE DIPLOMACY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
DON EMMANUEL MAY have been the obvious and logical choice as emissary to Dona Constanza, but he was a long way from being the best. This was because, ever since someone had told him in an ‘old-boy-just-a-word-in-your-ear’ manner that his Spanish was unacceptably vulgar, especially in his choice of adverbs, adjectives and common nouns, he had adopted a style of speech when talking to influential and respectable people which consisted partly of his customarily outrageous bluntness, and partly of
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