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

own irrationality and not in his country, General Carlo Maria loved his country as a son loves his mother or a brother his sister.
    He loved the Amazonas, with its impenetrable cascades of the lushest green vegetation, its enormous trees, its poisonous yellow frogs and giant snakes; its tigres, its crazy-faced monkeys, its aborigines who still went naked and hunted with blow-pipes and poisoned darts. He loved the Caribbean sea with its lugubrious fish and its million shades of aqua blue, its shimmering white and yellow sands. He loved the ancient Spanish towns upon its coast, the huge semi-wild pigs that dug themselves hollows and slept all day beneath the palms, the fishermen’s wives who would stare out to sea at dusk watching for their returning husbands and fearing sharks on their behalf. He loved the Pacific coast which rose almost immediately into spectacular mountains, and he shared the national grief with every earthquake and tidal wave that beat this shore into desolation and terror at times of the full moon, just as he shared the national pride in his countrymen’s abilities to fight back to normal thereafter, when even thieves did no looting and hardened rapists helped distressed women find their children in the cataclysm of mud and debris.
    Unlike almost all his countrymen, the General even loved the savannah, whose heat in the dry season would bleach the bones of the living and split the red rocks into shards with a report like that of a howitzer, and whose humidity in the wet season would drive people to sit all day up to their necks in rivers like Japanese monkeys in order to cool the body of sweat and evade the mosquitoes whose relentless envenomed probings could turn so easily into ulcers. The General would walk about these deserts of reptiles and heroic desiccated grasses peering up into the stumps of trees hollowed by lightning in order to see the swarms of inverted vampire bats which at night settled on the necks and rumps of horses and mules, and spread rabies more effectively than dogs. He would beat against the walls of thetrees with his military cane and guess by the light of a match how many of the twittering and squeaking creatures there must be whirling and wheeling in that unnatural darkness, dropping excrement of pure blood.
    He loved too the moon so large and resplendent that one can see all the seas and pockmarks without the aid of an instrument. In Europe he had been so contemptuous of their moon’s insignificance and lack of splendour that that, above anything else, had made him long to return home where one sees as clearly but more magically by night as by day. In Europe he had pitied the thunder and lightning, for at home the thunder cracks as though from inside one’s own head like the gun of a tank, and reverberates inside it until the plates of the skull seem to shiver apart at the seams. At home the lightning is brighter than the flame of magnesium, and freezes the world into tableaux like a randomly-set stroboscope; it fells huge trees before one’s very eyes, and splits apart to dance at the tips of mountains.
    And it was the mountains that General Fuerte loved the most, for as one proceeds through the altitudes, the climate and the life change through three distinct stages. For the first seven thousand feet it is the Garden of Eden, a luxuriance of orchids, humming-birds, and tiny streams of delicious water that run by miracle alongside every path. Above this height for three or four thousand feet is a world of rock and water draped like hanging gardens with alien, lunar plants in shades of brown and red and yellow with a habit so curious and enchanted as to be found in books of legend and romance. Above this is the Venusian world of ice, of sudden reckless mists of palpable water, of lichen and trickling springs, of fragmenting shale and glistening white peaks, where human realities become remote and ridiculous, where the sky is actually below you and inside you, where breathing