Free The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts by Louis De Bernières Page B

piassaba palms, and situlis with their exquisite crimson flowers. The Mendez left the farm alone, for they had gone to live in perpetuity in the capital, leaving the management to enganchadores who hired jornaleros and macheteros to work hard but without commitment to grow what little could be grown and to keep count of the cattle.
    The enganchadores adopted the usual method for not paying the workers; they would sell them the basics of life – food, tools, leather, horses, fake medicines made of seawater and chicken blood – and ensure that the campesinos always owed more than they earned. Enormous debts that were never to be paid off were inherited by sons and passed on in turn to their children, and there was an agreement amongst all latifundistas that they would never employ a peon who still owed money to his patron. In this way generations of the same families passed their protected but impoverished lives on the Vida Tranquila Hacienda.
    Centuries later, Don Hernandez, who had been speculating on government bonds with great success, decided that it wastime to put his money into minerals; and gold in particular, with a little coffee cultivation as a back-up. He knew that in the highlands beyond and above the Vida Tranquila he could grow the very finest Arabica beans for the connoisseur market in Europe and North America, and he also knew that beyond and above that there were a great many Inca mines which, if reopened, might yield a viable amount of ore. He hired a French engineer to examine these old workings, who came back with favourable reports, but who said that the mountains were still populated by Aymara Indians who were likely to be hostile to any industrial activity.
    Don Hernandez decided to go ahead in any case, and his workforce first went into action to erect fences way up into the hills and clear them for the coffee planting. This part of the plan went perfectly smoothly, but it was not quite so simple to fence off the mountains above; one cannot drive stakes into solid rock in neat lines over peaks and chasms, even if one does have a property deal signed by a government official. Eventually Don Hernandez was obliged to reconcile himself to having piles of stone erected at intervals around the periphery of his property, and to allowing free passage to travellers. But he was possessed of the fixed idea that he had to get rid of the Indians, whom he regarded as lower than the animals and far more dangerous.
    He sent bands of ruffians on forays to burn the Indian settlements and to hound the cholos off the land, even though they were officially protected by the Indian Protection Agency, and even though he had not a shred of legal justification for evicting them. Having moved their villages two or three times, the Aymaras naturally began to defend themselves, and very soon there was irregular warfare taking place all over that part of the Sierras which put an end to several centuries of peace. Don Hernandez’ bands of thugs were showing every sign of losing this war when he struck on the idea of laying mines bought on the sly from the quartermaster at Corazon Military Depot, and spraying the Aymaras and their crops with concentrated pesticides and herbicides from a crop-dusting aeroplane.
    When the people found themselves not only living in aplantless wilderness, but also coughing up blood, becoming covered with blisters, going blind, and being blown up by the ‘sudden-death-by-thunder’, they moved away at last, and some of them, Aurelio included, wandered far away for ever.
    Aurelio, although only a boy of fourteen, travelled southwards among the upper slopes of the foothills, staying in many pueblitos, working a little here and there. Often he was cold and hungry, shared caves with wild bulls, and risked his life following the goat-trails around the vertiginous sides of mountains. He knew neither where he was going nor what he intended to do, until one day he climbed high on an eastern slope and looked out