Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  They took a table out in the street, and while they waited for Ramon they watched the old men playing tejo and drinking chicha, even though the latter was illegal on account of its degenerative effects. Anica smoked a cigarette in her elegant manner, and Dionisio fetched the drinks and sat beside her, watching out for Ramon, who was always late because he was conscientious in his job. He strolled over to the old men and told them they had better hide the chicha because his friend who was arriving was a serious lawman, so they thanked him and carried on drinking it anyway.

  ‘Hola, my little Anaxagoras,’ said Ramon, raising his hand and then reaching it out to shake Dionisio’s. He leaned over to kiss Anica on both cheeks and squeeze her just enough to pretend that he was trying to make Dionisio jealous. He sat down with his eyes sparkling and said, ‘Vale, Amigo, what eternal truths have you discovered today while I was going about the humble task of bringing order to society?’

  ‘I have confirmed the truth of a proposition of Diogenes the Cynic, who said that when one’s best friend is an intellectual policeman, one will inevitably become the victim of sarcasm.’

  ‘Very true,’ replied Ramon. ‘Diogenes was wise enough to know that the carrying of a legal firearm on one’s hip inclines one to put on airs. Have you thought about what I said to you?’

  Dionisio smiled and said, ‘I am still obstinate,’ so Ramon replied, ‘And the evidence is, I suppose, not good enough?’

  ‘In this country, my Cochinillo, everyone knows that the evidence of a policeman is the direct contrary to the truth.’

  Ramon stroked his stubble as usual when he was thinking of a riposte. ‘Just as everyone knows that the opinion of a philosopher is never remotely connected to the real world, eh cabron?’

  They ordered a sancocho to eat between them, and it was just turning dark when the sicario appeared at the far end of the street.

  The Alcalde of Ipasueño had recently made it illegal to wear visors on motorcycles because the assassins of the coca-lords had developed a method of assassination which was almost foolproof, since all one had to do was to ride up to the victim on an unmarked motorcycle wearing a visor, fire one or two bullets, and then disappear at high speed before anybody could react. The incidence of these murders had increased to such an extent that whenever a motorcyclist with a visor appeared in the streets everybody automatically flung themselves to the ground or dived for doorways. The disruption to daily life caused by these dramatic scenes obliged the mayor to pass the law so that people could distinguish between innocent travellers and real murderers.

  The man on the motorcycle was wearing a visor. He had followed the couple all day on foot, waiting for a time when they would be sitting targets and chewing his nails down to the cuticles in his nervousness. He was thinking of returning to El Jerarca with the report that he could not find Dionisio, or perhaps bribing him with half of the money to pretend that he was dead, or perhaps going back with the story that the bullets had just bounced off. He had drunk so much beer in order to work up his courage that he desperately needed to piss, but could not relax enough to do it, so that his bladder was aching, his hands were shaking, and he had said fifty-four Ave Marias by the time that he commenced his ride of death.

  Ramon had sauntered inside to fetch some chilli to liven up the sancocho, and was just coming out when the street started to clear and even the dogs shot under the tables. From the doorway Ramon saw the sicario coming, and with a deft movement he undid the flap of his holster and drew out his revolver, cocking it at the same time. From the shadow of the door he had already taken up the firing position by the time the sicario had stopped opposite Dionisio and kicked the footgear into neutral. Ramon was just about to fire when the intended victim stood up and faced the sicario for lack of knowing what else to do, and blocked Ramon’s line of sight, so that he shouted to him to get down.

  The sicario drew out his automatic and levelled it at Dionisio, and the latter noticed with numb astonishment that the hand that held the gun was shaking so violently that the barrel was waving around. Despite his danger he was too paralysed to move, but Anica, seeing at last that the reality that she had striven so hard to exclude from possibility was finally forcing its way into the world, blocked all her fear from her mind and stepped in front of Dionisio. For a moment he was yet paralysed, but then he took her shoulders and threw her sideways, going down after her a split second later.

  Ramon and the sicario fired at exactly the same moment. Dionisio as he fell felt a hornet’s sting and a mule’s kick and a coral snake’s bite in the outer flesh of his right arm as the bullet burned a tear in his shirt, creased along the flesh, and thudded into the doorpost behind which Ramon was concealed. Ramon’s bullet in its turn took away the outer flesh of the arm of the assassin, and he nearly dropped his motorcycle, only just retrieving it in time to jam it frantically into gear and roar away as Ramon fired two more shots in his wake.

  Ramon strolled out into the street to pick up the weapon that the sicario had dropped. He came back with it, and deposited it on the table in front of Dionisio who was just standing up and leaning down to help Anica, who had bruised her head on the table. ‘Here is your evidence, Aristotle,’ he said.

  The sicario went back and reported to El Jerarca that the stories about Dionisio Vivo were true, and that one suffered in one’s own flesh the wounds intended for him. He showed his bloodied arm to prove it. Everyone who had been present knew perfectly well that the sicario had been shot by the unseen policeman behind the door, but no one wanted to believe a story of such banality, and anyone who related it was shouted down and ridiculed until even they began to believe the mythologised version. What impressed people even more with Dionisio’s invulnerability and preternatural power was that he refused to go to a doctor, and sat down and finished his sancocho with blood running down his arm, boasting to everyone within listening distance of how courageous his woman was. She was still in shock, and she put her arm around him and huddled closely so that his blood soaked into her breast.

  Despite his elaborate metaphysical precautions, El Jerarca, upon hearing the outcome of the attempt, felt a sharp pain in his arm that lasted for several days.

  26 Leticia Aragon (1)

  LETICIA HAD BEEN born unusual. To begin with she arrived in the world with the expression of a contented nun, and did not cry when she was inverted and slapped across the buttocks by Mama Florencia the midwife. In the second place, the birth-slime was not bloody and pink and white, but was lime-green and sweet-smelling. Mama Florencia assumed at first that Leticia had been stillborn, and she was wondering how to break the news to the mother when Leticia smiled and blew a large bubble.

  Her mother was thrilled with Leticia, with her full head of jet-black hair finer than gossamer and her eyes that seemed to be all colours at once. Never had a child been so amenable and easy. She slept for hours at all the most convenient times, did not make her mother’s nipples sore, and did not foul herself unless there were clean nappies in the laundry baskets. When she did fill her nappies, it was with excrement that smelled of mangoes and jackfruit.

  Leticia did not talk until she was three years old, and some people were beginning to say that she was mute; but then one day she was sitting under the table while her family ate refritos in the company of friends, and she said something. The story goes that the company was discussing the President’s chances at the next election, and her father was saying, ‘I think that the conservatives will get in,’ when a reedy little voice from down below said, ‘I doubt that very much.’ Such amazement fell upon them that they searched the room high and low for a ventriloquist, and Leticia’s mother said, ‘If one did not know better, one would have to assume that the child had spoken,’ whereupon she came out from under the table and said very vehemently, ‘So what if I did?’

  It is well known of course that some children wait until they have something sensible to say before they utter their first sentence, but Leticia seemed to have been born with her intell
ectual apparatus already brimming with knowledge. She performed such staggering feats of prowess that it became a common pastime in the pueblo to try to catch her out. People would ask her, ‘In what year did General Panela assume the dictatorship? Who was the Commander of the Navy in the first times of the disappearances? What was the name of the padre here in 1941?’ and Leticia would furrow her brow, think hard while moving her lips, and come out with the correct answer. So prodigious was her knowledge that she was examined by the cura, Don Tomaso, for the possibility of being possessed by the Devil. But at the conclusion of his investigation he found himself left with no alternative but to state that in his opinion her genius could only be explained either by the hypothesis that the Platonic theory of anamnesis was true, or else by reincarnation. For this opinion he came under the severest strictures from the bishop, who, it is said, passed him over for promotion forever afterwards, and always referred to him as ‘that damnable Hindu’.

  As she grew older it was with the greatest difficulty that Leticia could be persuaded to remain clothed. She would go out in the morning to play in the platano plantation, and would return in the evening stark naked. Her parents would search desperately for the garments, and Leticia would try to remember what had happened to them, but to no avail, and eventually it became clear by experimentation that she could only remain clothed in raiment that was of a turquoise colour and made of cotton.

  Leticia liked to wander around in a dream, and it was this as much as her black hair and her delicate bones that gave her the air of extraordinary beauty. It was not the kind of beauty that makes a man priapic, the beauty of a Bahian mulatta; it was the kind of beauty that is like a blow in the stomach and which physically hurts the eyes. Even when Leticia was very small Mama Florencia was fond of saying, ‘There will be men who die out of love for that girl, wait and see.’ But no one could have foreseen who would be the first to die.

  Leticia Aragon was a being so far from this world that it surprised no one that extraordinary events followed her about like fireflies tied to a Cubana’s hat. When she was small her mother never seemed to be able to find anything, even when it had been put down in a clearly-remembered place only minutes before. This drove Señora Aragon perfectly loca with frustration and irritation, and eventually she went to see the babalawo, who cast shells and told her very confidently that no, she was not going prematurely senile, she should look not to herself but to her daughter.

  From then on Señora Aragon observed her daughter, and discovered that all her missing possessions were in Leticia’s hammock. In a fury, she grabbed her child and beat the living daylights out of it, and this was the first and only time that Leticia ever cried. ‘Mama, it’s not my fault,’ she sobbed as her mother locked her in the chicken house, to be fed upon maize meal and water as her punishment for being a thief and a prankster.

  Leticia settled in very well in the chicken house and was soon covered in droppings from when the cockerel stood upon her head in order to crow in a more lordly fashion. But in the three days of her incarceration Señora Aragon’s possessions still gravitated towards the little girl’s hammock, and at the end of it Señora Aragon finally realised with a feeling akin to revelation that in fact her daughter’s gift was a blessing; for, amongst the pans and dishcloths, the hummingbird feathers and the kitchen knives that daily filled up the hammock, was the wedding-ring that had slipped from her finger and been lost when she had been pounding her washing upon the stones in the river. With tears in her eyes and prayers of gratitude to Saint Anthony she released Leticia from the coop, only to find that her daughter and the cockerel had formed a lasting and unbreakable attachment.

  It was from this humble beginning that Leticia arose as the finder of all lost things, and she came to earn more for her family than her father, who was the foreman on a not inconsiderable finca. She found Ignacio’s prized revolver that he had lost in Paraguay when trying to escape from a policeman, she found Maria’s missing cat, she found the gold medal that old Alfonso had won when he was a mercenary in the Chaco War, and she found the key that Don Jesuino had lost when he was tumbling a particularly fine mulatta behind the churchyard wall.

  With all this fame and fortune and her ethereal beauty, it cannot be surprising that so many fell in love with Leticia. When she was fourteen it was already impossible for the family to sleep at night for the cacophony of competing serenades outside her window, and by the time that she was fifteen it became necessary to install barbed wire around the walls because so many were trying to part the palm-leaves in the hope of seeing her naked in her room.

  If Señora Aragon had been thrilled with her daughter, it is even more true that Señor Aragon was besotted with her. He was a model father; when she was little he dandled her on his knee and told her stories, he played peekaboo and hide-and-seek, he changed her when she messed herself, he bathed her in the tub in the kitchen, and he competed with his wife for the privilege of preparing dainty dishes for her meals.

  But as Leticia grew older and flowered into the extreme beauty of early womanhood, Señor Aragon’s paternal love grew imperceptibly into something greater and guiltier. He would look at her budding curves and then try to think of something else; he would observe her lips as she spoke, and think about how it would be to have just one kiss. His eyes would be drawn up her slender thighs to that place that so many dreamed of, and he would imagine for a furtive second the absolute pleasure of running his fingers through that paradise. The unfortunate Señor Aragon could obliterate her from his imagination neither in the faithful embrace of his wife nor in the arms of the girls of the whorehouse, and it became a torment.

  27 Medicine

  THAT EVENING ANICA washed the wound and bound it up, but she made Dionisio swear to go to the clinic in the morning to get injections against it going bad. She knew that he distrusted doctors to such an extent that he claimed that doctors were the greatest single cause of disease and death in the entire world, so she told him that in the morning she was coming around personally to accompany him. She tried to make him promise to be more careful from now on about his movements, but he astonished her by telling her that in his opinion the sicario had really been attempting to assassinate Ramon. She shook her head pityingly and put her hand on his cheek as if to indicate that only a man as indestructibly disconnected from reality as he was could possibly believe anything so stupid, but he said that they had been trying to get Ramon for a long time and that the sicario had not fired until he had started to fall sideways, and had not the bullet gone into the doorpost behind which Ramon was concealed? Anica grasped at what little sense there was in this and almost fooled herself into maybe believing it, but all the same she decided that as soon as the holiday began she would get him away from there no matter what the neighbours would say or how much her father would shout at her. After she had made love to him gently so as not to hurt his wound, she went home and found that Ramon had left her a note asking her to do the very thing that she had just decided.

  Dionisio only agreed to go to the clinic because now that he was with Anica he was more in love with life and had developed an idea that he should take care of his health. Nowadays everything that he did was done half for her even when it had nothing to do with her at all.

  At the clinic they made him wait for an hour so that he had to telephone the college and tell them that he would be late because he had been shot. The Principal sighed and said ‘Vale, Dionisio, this makes a little change from dead bodies and severed hands in the garden,’ and Dionisio went back into the clinic and read all the posters on the walls about poisonous plants and the efficacy of condoms as a prophylactic against venereal disease. He sat down next to Anica and she took his hand because she knew that he was nervous. Then he was called up by the nurse and he had to fill in a form in triplicate and sign a document saying that in the event of death or injury caused by his treatment he would not hold the clinic responsible, and a similar one saying that if he lost any property at the clinic it was his
problem and not theirs.

  He went into a cubicle and the grim nurse with hairs sprouting out of her moles unwrapped his wound and inspected it. She grunted and poured a helping of antibiotic powder over it before rebinding it. Then she said, ‘I am going to give you two shots; one is antibiotic and the other is anti-tetanus. One will be in the thigh and the other will be in the backside, so take off your trousers and underwear.’

  Dionisio protested that the tetanus was unnecessary because no tetanus germ could possibly survive a journey down a gunbarrel, but she gave him a look so hostile that he changed his approach and said, ‘Why can I not have the injections in my arm?’

  ‘Because,’ she said, ‘in my experience people tend to struggle and then faint.’

  ‘I do not. I will find it very interesting to watch the needle go in.’

  ‘Take off your trousers,’ ordered the nurse with the hairy moles, so that he felt thoroughly frightened and intimidated, and did as she said. He realised to his shame that he was wearing his oldest blue underpants full of holes, and he knew with absolute certainty that the nurse was relishing his humiliation.

  The first injection in the thigh was almost perfectly painless, and he was prematurely revising his low opinion of the medical sciences when the disgruntled nurse stabbed him in the buttock with a needle so long and so thick that it would have astonished even a ceibu bull. As it tore through the muscle a spasm of anguish shot down his leg so quickly that it seemed to arrive before it had even set off. He jerked and shouted, and she stuck it in deeper and said through her teeth, ‘Do not clench. It only makes it worse.’ But a pain of such exaggerated megalomania would have made even an anaesthetised fakir clench, and Dionisio clenched. As the contents of the veterinary syringe were pumped into him the dolour spread inside him like a burn, so that when he stood up he was engulfed by a cyclone of nausea and he fell flat on the bed. ‘There,’ said the nurse triumphantly, oozing with satisfaction and lack of sympathy, ‘lie down until you feel better, and I will go and tell your wife that you will be out in a minute.’