The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts Read Online Free PDF

that a dark stain had spread across the shirt of the peasant, that his eyes had clouded and glazed, and that blood was trickling gently from the corners of his mouth. The body already lookedas though there was nobody at home, and the puro lay smoking in the stones as though nothing very important had happened. Federico knew without looking that the man was completely dead, and that he was responsible. He sat numbly against the rock, and in a strange but appropriate gesture of respect, smoked the rest of the dead man’s cigar down to the stub, just as the dead man would have done. Federico was not to stop shaking and retching for two days. After this he merely shook; this was his second encounter with pointless death in as many days.
    Federico began to pile stones around the body, but he could not bear to see the man’s upturned eyes every time he approached, nor could he bear to see the flies that had already gathered to lay their eggs, nor the stream of ants that had appeared from nowhere and were crawling in a black unanimous stream up the man’s cheek, into his eyes and into his open mouth.
    There was a guttural croak behind him, and he turned, violently frightened, to see a repulsive hook-beaked, bald-headed, moth-eaten turkey-vulture on the ground, its wings stretched and beating slowly. It was looking at him with one eye. He bent down and picked up a rock to hurl at the bird, which croaked once more, and skipped backwards impatiently. There was a flurry of wings and two more birds arrived to see if the corpse was really dead. One of them tentatively pecked at an upturned eye and plucked it out, at which point Federico gathered up the rifle and ran stumbling away, unaware that Pedro the Hunter and Aurelio the Indian had been watching him for the last ten minutes from the cover they had sought whilst tracking a small deer.
    It was purely by chance that Dona Constanza was inspecting her tack in the stables when Pedro was outside confiding in Sergio that his son had killed a man. That night, full of that indignant public spirit which all conservatives manifest over matters of law and order, she wrote to the nearest chief of police two hundred kilometres away in Cucuta. Not wishing to be disturbed by having to do his job, this official sent it to thecapital, where three months later it was filed and forgotten, to moulder ominously for years like a forgotten land-mine.
    So it was that Federico’s personal revolution, like all wars and revolutions, began with the death of an innocent, who in this case had four children to provide for and had always wanted to own a gun.

4
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IN WHICH SERGIO GRAPPLES WITH THE PROBLEM OF THE CANAL
    IN THE LAST few days events had conspired to disrupt Sergio’s life quite severely. Firstly, his twin brother Juanito had been murdered by the army, but the following night he had appeared in a dream and reassured Sergio that everything was all right. He had also confirmed that when his body was well-rotted Sergio could disinter his head and hire it out for magic at a good profit, for everyone knew that the skull of a twin was by far the most potent channel of communication with the angels. The loss of his beloved brother, therefore, was a grief that could be borne with some degree of equanimity.
    Secondly, Federico had disappeared with the rifle, Sergio’s most treasured possession, and moreover he had, according to the hunter, killed a man with it. Sergio knew in his heart that his son had gone off on some necessary business that was to do with becoming a man, as he himself had done at roughly the same age when he had gone to look for emeralds in the cordillera, but he was angry about his Enfield even though in fact he had never used it, but always kept it against the day when violence would erupt in the countryside as his twin’s intuition told him it surely would. He was also anxious that the relatives of the dead man would find out who had killed him and arrive one night with blazing