Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  He tried repeatedly to stand up, but was defeated by the paralysing stiffness in his leg. Eventually he felt so shamed by his weakness that he dragged himself out to Anica by holding onto chairs, fixtures on the wall, and anything else within reach.

  She took him by the arm and virtually carried him up the hill. By the time that they arrived he was sweating in waterfalls and feeling utterly sick, so she put him to bed and went to call the college to say that he would be very late because the doctor had made him ill. She sat by him for a long time, and then she asked him, ‘How is your culo?’ So he said, ‘It would have been better to have been shot in the culo and injected in the arm,’ not knowing that ever since a survey in 1966 had established beyond reasonable doubt that nine thousand, seven hundred and three registered prostitutes were suffering from fifteen thousand, seven hundred and forty-six cases of venereal diseases, it had been government policy to inject everyone possible with the elephantine concoction that had just assaulted his metabolism and raised its joyous, multicoloured flag of conquest, which took the form of a green, red, yellow and violet bruise that spread all over his buttock, took two weeks to subside, and made some of the natural functions of the body difficult and painful to perform. Anica made him pose for her, and she painted a sensitive portrait of his backside in vivid colours.

  During this two weeks Anica thought up various plans to get Dionisio away from Ipasueño.

  Anica proposed to Dionisio that they should go to Madrid, where she had friends, and then possibly France, where she had more friends. Dionisio’s heart sank, because he was still up to the crown of his head in debt from the last time that he had gone to Spain, even though he had only slept on building-sites. Anica was blessed with a rich and indulgent father, and she had long ago acquired the knowledge that lack of money was not an obstacle to anything, and so had no experience of the kind of desperate straits that leading a civilised life on a professor’s salary could bring. He said, ‘Oh no, querida, Madrid is so hot at this time of year that even the local people cannot stand it; every day is a perpetual siesta. I thought that you wanted to go to Guyana.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have thought about that, but I want to go in the dry season.’

  So he said, ‘Why do you not go to Madrid? Really I cannot afford it, but I do not want to spoil life for you. When you come back, perhaps we can go to visit my sisters, or perhaps we can go to stay with my parents in Valledupar. I can find some work for a while, and then maybe we can fly to the Caribbean. We can go to Nueva Sevilla. It is very old and beautiful, and it has hundreds of little corners and hiding-places for lovers to court in.’

  Anica laughed and exclaimed, ‘You think of nothing else,’ but privately she thought that Valledupar and Nueva Sevilla were maybe far enough away from Ipasueño. In the meantime she thought of ways to get him away from his usual haunts.

  El Jerarca felt none of Dionisio’s pain in his distended and steatopygous backside, and this raises the question as to whether or not the pain in his arm was psychosomatic.

  28 Las Locas (1)

  ANICA AND DIONISIO were sitting in the living-room drinking tintos and watching the television. Dionisio was wearing wet trousers because he had a venerable percolator that when it was overexcited shot dramatic spouts of coffee across the kitchen. He had been caught in one of its throbbing ejaculations, and Anica had sponged the grains off him and told him to change his trousers and soak them. He had said, ‘Yes, querida, but I will drink my tinto first.’ She was leaning against him with her head on his shoulder and her arm linked through his, thinking about nothing at all except how good it was to be sitting like this with her head on his shoulder and her arm through his.

  He pulled an Inca out of the packet with his teeth, flicked it straight with his tongue, and took a fosforo from the box. He lit it with one hand by laying the box upon one side, pressing it down with his third finger, and striking it by flicking the match between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I love the way you do that,’ said Anica, because the deftness of the trick had suddenly increased her happiness.

  He tried to show her how it was done, and the first time that she did it the matchbox would not stay upright, and the second time it flew across the room. On the third time the head of the match detached itself and described a flaring arc, arriving with an unerring instinct for destructiveness on a cushion. ‘Madre de Dios,’ exclaimed Anica, and she leapt up and stamped it out, saying, ‘No, I will use only the conventional method in future.’

  Just at that moment a woman named Fulgencia Astiz arrived in Ipasueño, attracted by the myth of Dionisio Vivo and vowing to have his child. She had come all the way from Buenaventura carrying only a mochila full of essential supplies and several bottles of infallible love-potions. She had managed to catch lifts on lorries and in jeeps, and had avoided molestation by means of a Corpus Christi blessed as an anti-rape charm and by means of her formidable musculature, which had enabled her to disarm one man with a knife and leave him triumphantly with a broken nose. She took up residence in a cheap guest-house, and every day wandered about the town looking for Dionisio, positive that when she saw him she would recognise him by instinct.

  But that evening Fulgencia Astiz discovered that the three women with whom she shared her room in the guest house had all arrived with the same intentions as herself. They had a bitter row about their respective claims to priority in the business of having Dionisio Vivo’s child, in which each enumerated her merits and expatiated upon the profundity of her irreversible love, and then they had a fight. As it was all against each, they disappeared into a multi-limbed flailing, spitting, scratching bundle from which there originated language such as to redden the ears of the most phlegmatic lifelong jailbird. When the floor was completely covered with wrenched-off locks of black hair and broken fingernails, and just before Agustin arrived from the police station to quell the brouhaha, they fell into each other’s embrace, swearing eternal sisterhood and complicity in their quest, and spent the rest of the evening plotting to achieve it by means of a campaign of Napoleonic severity and grandeur.

  Fulgencia Astiz and her accomplices sat on their beds and discussed their intuitions about Dionisio Vivo. Fulgencia believed that she would know him by sight because he was so handsome, but another one said that when she perused his letters in La Prensa a faint but unmistakable aroma of carnations pervaded her room, and that she was sure that she would know him by this. Another said that when she dreamed about making love to him she distinctly heard the sound of cyclones tearing corrugated-iron roofs from houses, and the last said that he had come to her as a ghost of the living and spoken with her so that she would know the sound of his voice. They bought a map of the town from the town hall and divided the town into four sections, so that each one of them could scour a section systematically with all her senses on red alert until his whereabouts were revealed. When he had been found they would go to him together and beg him to accept their collective devotion.

  The trickle of women into Ipasueño continued. There were women from every region; there were Antioqueñas, with their classical fatalism and dauntless will to struggle even when lacking opposition, with their carefully nurtured neuroticism, their perverse regionalism, and their unconquerable propensity to pronounce their ‘s’ even more thickly than the Castilian. There were industrious Narinenses with their aberrant traditionalism, their passionate political opinions, their extreme sobriety, their embarrassing hospitality, their obstinate opposition to progress until the thing they opposed was already old-fashioned, and their curious vocabulary and manner of speaking in the front of the mouth. There were Cundi-boyacense, with their Indian physiognomy, their elaborate diffidence and their vicuna-like timidity, their thirst for unconnected and useless information, and their impetuous submissiveness. There were conceited Costeñas with their overstated views, their bonhomie, their African blood, their profligate generosity, fatuous sense of humour, lack of anything to conceal, and, in speaking, their suppression of those vit
al intervocalic consonants which make meaning communicable. And apart from stray women from other countries, such as a Tibetan who believed that the Andes were the true and original Himalayas, there were Santandereanas; these were implacably aggressive types who in more normal times devoted themselves to litigation over boundaries, memorising grievances, worshipping pointless acts of valour, and conducting a diabolical love affair with death in all its more violent manifestations. This was why they outnumbered all the others put together, for they foresaw that Dionisio Vivo was a doomed man; they wanted to be there when he was assassinated, they wanted to witness his heroism, and they wanted their children by him to die with inherited courage against similarly inconceivable odds.

  Beyond these generalisations one might add those pertaining to national characteristics, which were shared by all. As we know, the nation is divided not by latitude nor by longitude, but by altitude; for the higher one lives, the less one is extroverted and confiding, and the more one is suspicious and devious. However, the women were at one in resenting comparisons, because of the danger of them being unfavourable, and they were at one in disliking responsibility, because of the danger of losing one’s freedom. Slower to anger than the Spanish, they were capable of even greater zealotry and self-sacrifice, stoicism and endurance. Each one of them objectively considered herself to be the very centre of the universe, and consequently they found each other’s pride intolerable. They were vehemently impatient of results, and shared a dislike of machinery so great that if the bus on which they were travelling broke down, even in the middle of nowhere, they were always extremely gratified to be so vindicated in their hatred.

  They possessed the extraordinary ability to assess a person at a stroke with the objectivity of a behaviourist, the intuition of a Jungian, and the certainty of a scientologist, and esteemed no one more than those who lacked airs and graces. Their wits were sharper than the machetes of campesinos and the spikes of cactus, which compensated for their dislike of work, and which enabled them to amuse each other despite the lack of facilities in their camp.

  But more than this they enjoyed in full measure the national gift for friendship and generosity. In their encampment gifts circulated with such rapidity that they could return to their original donors in a matter of hours having passed through the hands of every one of their number, and such vows of eternal friendship were made that the saints became wearied for being so frequently invoked in witness. And, like all their compatriots, they possessed a unique gift for quoting apposite snatches of verse, so that, from having been so much in each other’s company, their speech became exquisitely metrical.

  At first the women had had the problem of where to live. There were no hotels to speak of, and the pensions were already overcrowded and unpleasant. Some of the women took to living an indigent life in the streets, sleeping in doorways and under arches, and posing a threat to the safety of the pedestrians who stumbled over them in the darkness. Some of the more enterprising amongst them lodged with local inhabitants and worked as servants in return for board and lodging, so that households that had been poorer than beggars suddenly found themselves in the enviable position of being waited upon hand and foot. Eventually the women set up their own camp on the fringes of the town, so that Ipasueno, just like the capital, grew its own little favela, which was constructed out of cardboard, corrugated iron, abandoned pieces of cars, lumps of wood, and the detritus of avalanches, all tied down and together with string and pieces of rags. Ramon had rented out his goat field at a peso per person per day, and found that not only did he have a better income from that, but also the women made pets of his goats and spoiled them, feeding them titbits and pieces of panela, so that their milk and flesh became aromatic and sweet-tasting and fetched a much better price in the market. The patient women put up with the goats eating their habitations from over their heads in return for their wilful but entertaining company.

  Less welcome to the women was the persistent company of gangs of wolfish men who gathered at their encampment and pestered and nauseated them with suggestive remarks and salacious invitations. These were treated with the haughty disdain that they deserved, but less easy to deal with were the constant sexual assaults and attempted violations. Matters came to a head when a band of armed thugs from the Club appeared in a jeep and attempted to abduct some women at gunpoint, to save themselves the trouble of raiding the pueblitos.

  The crucial mistake that these men made was connected with their ignorance of the ways of Santandereanas, who made up by far the greater proportion of the women’s number. As soon as it became evident what was happening, they emerged from their tents and hovels armed with machetes, revolvers, shotguns, and clubs, and overwhelmed the ruffians in a few frenetic seconds. One of the women, without a moment’s thought to her own comfort, removed the ropes from her little barraca, which then descended sideways to the ground, and tied them all up in a bundle. They pushed the wild-eyed and protesting parcel straight over the mountainside, without having failed to attach with a pin a lengthy letter stating the reasons for their action to the shirt of every one of them. The warrior-like Santandereanas cheered as the bundle bounced down the rocks, and they repeated the performance with every subsequent invasion of would-be rapists until the gorge was black with vultures, confounding a local saying that the chasm was so deep that no bird would overfly it, and the raids ceased.

  More subtle and insidious were the attentions of the dozens of men who travelled in from far and wide claiming to be Dionisio Vivo. To begin with a number of women fell for this ploy, but realised the deception almost immediately afterwards, having found the experience of making love to the impostors insufficiently mystical. One or two of them fell for the charm of the more engaging deceivers and ran off with them, having waived the purpose of their visit, but thereafter the remainder of the women began to operate a simple vetting system, which can be illustrated by what happened to Jerez.

  Like most others who arrived claiming to be Dionisio Vivo and hoping for free love, Jerez’ appearance immediately aroused suspicion. To begin with he was almost completely bald, had a flabby stomach, a dirty shirt, huge bags under his eyes, a syphilis chancre on his lip, and a ridiculous support bandage around his knee. His face displayed none of the intellectual acuity expected of Dionisio Vivo, and none of the anticipated Christlikeness, not even the nimbus. The redoubtable Fulgencia Astiz demanded to know the exact date when Dionisio’s last letter had appeared in La Prensa, and the nature of its contents. Jerez divagated unconvincingly and with extreme vagueness upon the supposed contents of the letter, and then Fulgencia demanded to see his cedula.

  ‘My cedula?’ echoed Jerez.

  ‘Yes, your Certificado Judicial, which the law requires you to carry. Produce it.’

  Another Santandereana with her black hair cascading about her face and a formidable magnum in her hand stepped out and took his cedula from his shirt pocket. She inspected it carefully, noted the ornate renewal stamps and the print of the right index finger, and then she noticed the name. She showed it to Fulgencia, who looked contemptuously at Jerez, who looked very embarrassed, and started to say, ‘I am very sorry, ladies, but you are very charming and . . .’ But the magnum was jabbed into his back, and he was seen off to jeers, amid a shower of rocks and refuse, and he never came back to repeat the trick. Instead he went to the Casa Rosa, and they would not have him either because of the chancre on his lip.

  Living so close to nature and with so few amenities, the women very soon took on a wild and dishevelled appearance, and became an object of curiosity and occasional ridicule to the people of Ipasueño. They were often overheard having fairly raucous celebrations, and all sorts of bizarre rumours started to circulate about them, of which the only ones that bore any semblance to the truth were that they were capable of tearing people to pieces and were followers of Dionisio Vivo.

  Curiously enough, the women never took the obvious step of going to Ipasueño College to find him. It was as if they all ent
ertained the suspicion that meeting their hero in the flesh might be a disappointment. There grew up a tacit understanding in their own mythology that one day he would come to them.

  Those of a classical disposition immediately saw the parallels, and started to call them ‘The Bacchantes’, or ‘The Maenads’, depending upon whether their inclinations were Latin or Hellenic. Ramon, probably the only policeman in the department who knew anything about ancient myth, mischievously took advantage of this and put about a lot of stories about Dionisio which were intended to reach the ears of El Jerarca, but which he had sedulously culled from an encyclopaedia.

  He would entertain the credulous habitués of bars with wonderful tales of how Dionisio had once turned into a little goat and been tended by water nymphs, about how he had been seen in a chariot pulled by tigers, about how he had once turned a river into wine so that his pursuers became drunk in it and drowned, about how vines grew up around him and how someone attempting to cut them down with a machete had instead cut off his own foot. He told them that when anyone attempted to bind him the bonds just fell off, that he could change into a lion, and that he had once rescued his mother from the spirit world by swapping her for the one he loved the most. These tales rapidly spread all over town, and Ramon would sometimes be greatly amused to find them retold to himself with even greater exaggeration than that with which he had ornamented them in the first telling.