Aside from the pistol on the couch and the the broken bottles on the outer walls that were intended to "scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs," the Colonel's family, with whom the speaker and her friend have dinner, is, to her expected readership, a typical, upper-middle class household with pets, a maid, and fluency in English. His daughter takes pride in her appearance, his son spends time with friends, and his wife is a good hostess.
The Colonel himself? Well he, like many do in their leisure, collects things--not rocks, coins, or army paraphernalia, but human ears. His collection of these ears is presented as being almost cannibalistic. After dinner, he carts them into the dining area in a grocery bag as if he was offering a store-bought cake for dessert. The speaker says that they looked like "dried peach halves." He places one in a water glass. In the midst of these estranged ears, the Colonel finishes off his glass of wine. The speaker is emphasizing his complete comfort with food in, what for most, would be a wholly unappetizing situation.
In his defense, though, the Colonel's one redeeming quality is that he stores his ear collection in a re-usable grocery sack in true environmentalist fashion, and for a third world country in the 70s, I'd say that that's rather remarkable, wouldn't you?
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