Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  This is the reason why Lazaro went once with Pedro and Misael to Ipasueno and never came back, because he was hoping to find there an even greater brujo.

  48 Anica’s Last Mistake

  DIONISIO VIVO, EVEN though he was not a coward, often felt that he had died many times in his life. On this occasion the goatherd on the crag who had watched his doings with morbid fascination had contemplated his swinging body and the steadily spreading patch of urine for several moments whilst working out what to do. He knew very well that people only do this sort of thing when they choose of their own free will to die, and he felt that it would be a sacrilege against the sacred liberties of man to interfere with a desperate creature’s last rational act. He turned and walked away.

  But he could not help but return. With a sigh he laid down his staff and his antara side by side on the ground and began to climb the tree. Then he thought better of it and he came down again. He picked up his staff and leaned out to see if he could hook the rope. It was just not long enough, and so he grabbed a branch and leaned out over the abyss to hook it. With all his strength he pulled against Dionisio’s weight and the friction of the rope, and hauled the dangling body with its upturned eyes and its protruding blue tongue towards him. With relief he found that there was enough rope to bring the corpse over the edge of the chasm. Hastily he attempted to loosen the rope, but it had pulled too tight. ‘Mierda, mierda, mierda,’ he intoned as he tugged at the unrelenting hemp, and then he changed his appeals and addressed them to Viracocha. He took out his knife and began to saw at the rope over a place where a quick inspection of his own neck with his fingers revealed that he had no arteries. When the knife finally broke through and the last fibres parted, it left a gash in Dionisio’s neck six centimetres long that became a scar almost as livid as the permanent violet and magenta imprint of the rope.

  During his National Service years before, the goatherd had reluctantly learned the art of smiting a dummy upon the sternum and giving it artificial respiration. But with a real corpse it was different. He knew that one can stop a heart just as easily as start it, and he put an ear against the cadaver’s chest. He detected only the pounding of waterfalls in his own ears. He felt for a pulse, but then could not remember which finger it was that gave one only one’s own pulse and not that of the victim. He thumped the corpse’s sternum anyway, and then pumped air into the chest cavity by a series of rapid depressions with both hands upon the chest. Then he remembered to clear the body’s throat with his fingers, and he began to breathe into its mouth, but at first he forgot to pinch the nostrils, until he felt his own breath coming back at him, and then remembered.

  For the goatherd it became a matter of manly defiance of fate to revive this man. He persisted beyond the call of duty, all the time resolving to give up smoking because all this breathing was killing him, and in between his efforts he called the corpse an hijo de puta and an hijo de perra, until in the end he was convinced that the corpse only came back to life because its spirit returned in order to find out who had been insulting it.

  The goatherd smoked two cigarettes while he watched Dionisio moaning his way back to consciousness. When Dionisio inhaled the sweet clear air of the sierra he thought that he must be in paradise, and when he opened his eyes and saw the magisterial peaks soaring above him with their points capped with snow and embellished with clouds, he thought that he knew that he was.

  The goatherd led him away by draping his arm about his shoulder and giving him simple commands, and as soon as he saw the old car he knew exactly who it was that he had raised from the dead. For the pleasure of driving such an old vehicle he took Dionisio into the town and left him at the police station, where Ramon came in and saw him, and took him straight to the clinic. He was told to wait by the stegosaurian nurse, but he took his gun from his holster and forced her to treat his friend immediately upon pain of instant arrest. Ramon took Dionisio home with him and looked after him himself for two weeks.

  The goatherd fully enjoyed the notoriety of having rescued the famous Dionisio Vivo from hanging above the chasm; he did not have to buy himself a drink for months. As the story got around town it became elaborated and embroidered, until finally everybody knew that for the second time Dionisio Vivo had arisen from the dead, and people were saying that he had died publicly and locally simply in order to prove to everyone that he truly was indestructible. And furthermore he now had two jaguars just like those of Aurelio the brujo, and so that confirms all of those stories as well, does it not, cabron? We all know what kind of people have two tame jaguars as black as Cerberus himself, do we not, cabron? And you can see the weals of the rope on his neck and the scar where he cut his own throat without bleeding to death, so that proves it all happened just as they say, amigo.

  In the camp the women held bacchantic celebrations, but Janita heard the rumours and wrote to Anica that Dionisio had tried to kill himself, saying, ‘Why in the name of God can you not tell him the simple truth? He has enough influence around here to wipe out El Jerarca three times over.’ But Anica only went pale and trembled when she read of Dionisio’s madness and of his heroic sorrow, and continued to wait for a time when it might be safe to love him.

  Dionisio had no more tears. In his spare time he would sit paralysed in bars becoming drunk and lighting one cigarette after another from the stubs, talking with derelicts. He gave up music because he began to hate anything that made him feel sentimental. He gave up watching the television because he no longer cared what was in the news. He began to govern his life by his recollection of all those things that Anica had or had not liked, so that when he did such a simple thing as go for a paseo he would notice everything that she would have noticed until in the end it was as if he had assimilated her entire personality into his own and had found by that means a method of being perpetually in her company.

  In his sleep the faces of his friends and relatives loomed and faded before his eyes offering conflicting advice and explanations. In his dreams he was catapulted back and forth between the confident expectation of success and the abyss of emptiness that was his daily life.

  In his waking life he had periods of glacial calm followed by periods of dangerous rage, followed by periods of bottomless abjection, followed by exhaustion, followed by sleep that was strangled once more by nightmares from which he awoke in an ocean of perspiration and terror. When sleep evaded him he would run for kilometres in the night with his eyes closed and without crashing into anything, he would do press-ups until his bones cracked, he wrote hundreds of worthless poems, and he wrapped up presents to give to Anica which he stacked in boxes in Jerez’ room.

  He wrote her a letter saying that he must see her for one last time, that it was the last time that he would ever ask anything of her, that he felt as though he were dying and therefore needed to see her face and hear her voice. To his amazement she wrote back and accepted. She gave him a precise time to meet her, and gave him the address of a restaurant in the capital. She begged him to tell no one that he was coming.

  If Anica had not spiralled downwards, it was because she knew and understood everything that had happened, and because she had faith that one day everything could be salvaged. Unlike Dionisio she had her devotion to her art, which, together with the child that was yet only a foetus, would at once absorb her attention and reduce her feelings of isolation. But she accepted Dionisio’s invitation because she could not help herself.

  In the interim Dionisio assaulted a pupil for laughing at the misfortune of another. He dragged the young man over his desk and threw him down the steps of the faculty. The students changed his nickname from ‘The Knight of The Sorrowful Countenance’ to ‘Samson’, and he was summoned by the principal, who had every intention of dismissing him. But he took one look at Dionisio and was vividly reminded of the story of Philoctetes abandoned forever on an island with his gangrenous foot and his eternal bitterness. In the face of such clearly epic sadness, the principal decided to write to the General begging him
to take his son away on paid leave.

  The General caused a sensation in the town by arriving in a Homeric helicopter gunship and landing it in the plaza in the middle of a concert by a Mexican mariachi band that was on an international tour. The General’s intention was partly to scare the shit out of the local coca brigands, and partly to demonstrate once and for all to his son that his paternal love was without frontiers and limitations. Its more immediate effect was to disperse the comic-opera sombreros of the Mexicans to the four winds, along with their stick-on Zapata moustaches.

  The General and two soldiers armed like guerrillas strode up the hill of the Calle de la Constitucion and walked in without knocking. They found Dionisio in a chaos of boxes, empty bottles, and cigarette ends, sitting in the middle of the floor on crossed legs, with a half-grown jaguar on either side of him in the sentinel’s attitude of the cats of Bast.

  The General threw some of his son’s clothes into a suitcase, and then lifted him under the arms into a standing position and embraced him; but he stood without response with his arms dangling at his side and his fingers twitching. The General saw in his son’s eyes that unblinking autistic look that suggested to him that his son was on a lengthy celestial voyage somewhere in between the stars.

  When he and his cats were helped into the gunship it seemed to those who had gathered to gawp that the solicitous hands of the soldiers who were helping him were in fact the hands of kidnappers. It got about that Dionisio Vivo had been captured by US Marines and extradited to the USA for writing calumnious things about US foreign policy in his last coca letter. There was yet another predictable wave of antigringoism.

  Mama Julia was horrified by his appearance. His hair had grown long, thin and lank, he had a strangled beard, and he had the look of interstellar voyage in his eyes that wept invisible tears more than the Bleeding Heart of Jesus wept blood. She shaved him and cut his hair because in her opinion it was a blasphemy to look so much like the Messiah.

  After two days asleep in bed curled up with his cats in the absolute sleep of those who no longer live in this world, Dionisio woke up and got out of bed feeling detached. He went downstairs and found that his family were in full counsel around the kitchen table, and they greeted him as though he were a neighbour just calling in to borrow some coffee, because in a close family one never feels so apart that it is necessary to be exhilarated upon reunion.

  He told them that soon he was going to see Anica. His sisters, who had arrived after two days of fervent and determined travel, informed him that according to their infallible intuition of a female Montes Sosa, Anica without one shadow of a hint of vacillation wanted him to ask her to marry him. Mama Julia, with the practicality of the females of her own line, told Dionisio that she was going to take him out to buy new trousers and shoes so that he could ask her to marry him in clothes that did not carry with them the atmosphere of past unhappiness, and told him that he should give Anica the King of Portugal’s ring until such time as he could get a suitable replacement.

  So it was that he returned to Ipasueño in the gunship to leave the cats with Juanito, and took the mailplane to the capital wearing new clothes and bearing in his hand a rose from which he had superstitiously removed all the thorns.

  At first he could not see Anica in the restaurant, but then a tall man waved to him. He had to look at her twice before he realised that it was she. He thought that Anica must have let being a student go to her head, because she was wearing a man’s greatcoat, a large floppy hat, and a black wig that on close inspection was revealed to be home-made. He laughed for the first time since he had last seen her, but said nothing because he was terrified of offending her upon such a crucial evening.

  Beneath her amateur disguise Anica was looking at once pale and thin from her sadness, and fat-faced from chocolate and the natural mechanisms of pregnancy. They sat opposite each other across the table without knowing what to say, and then she told him that after Nocebueno she was going to go to study in Uruguay for four years.

  Refusing to absorb or to contemplate this information, he took her hand across the table and felt it grow moist in his own as it always had. He told her quietly and with the air of one delivering a distillation of eternal truth that he loved her totally, that he desired to give to her his life and liberty. He said that he intended to find a better job in the capital, which would be easy now that he was well known, that he intended to support her through her studenthood and through the time when she was struggling to become known as an artist. He told her that he knew a great many influential people in the world of art because of his academic contacts, that she would love to be in his family, and that his family adored her already. He painted pictures in words of how they would spoil her, how he and everyone else would devote their lives to ensuring her happiness. At the end of this complex peroration he asked her in the simplest form of words to take his life and to marry him.

  Anica was thrown into a maze from which there seemed to be no exit. She turned pale and her lips trembled, she averted her eyes and gazed out through the glass at the perpetual autumnal rain and the passing Cadillacs of the wealthy, and tried to think what she could say. With her eyes brimming she turned to him and said the only thing that seemed to her that it was possible to say: ‘I want you to know that I could never marry anyone that I did not love.’

  But Anica had left out the premiss antecedent to this declaration, a premiss that she took to be implicit, which was that she would never love anyone but him and would therefore marry no one else.

  But Dionisio’s mind, with its chronic literality of a linguistic philosopher and its masculine deafness to the unsaid, simply went numb and then computed the obvious implication that she was refusing him because she did not love him. He sat through the rest of the meal in the silence of one who knows that in the morning he will be stood before a firing squad without even the indulgence of a last request.

  Out in the everlasting rain of the capital she embraced him tightly for the last time. Beneath her marquee of a greatcoat Anica was wearing her familiar faded lilac jumpsuit, and, wrapped inside that coat which enclosed them both, Dionisio pressed his body for what seemed to him to be the last time against the gentle puellic curves which had for so long been his new-found land that had constituted the entire compass of the world.

  Anica was remembering the imprint of his body and the way that it seemed to tessellate with hers so that they fitted together like the fabled divided androgynes of the Platonic myth. He gave her the rose, saying, ‘When that flower fades, remember that I never did.’ She walked away into the dogged infinite rain and stopped in a doorway in order to weep with pity about the atrocious scars of the rope, and Dionisio walked away in his new clothes of a marital optimist and slept through the night in the café of the railway station with his head on the table because one place was as good as another for annihilation.

  49 Another Statistic

  ‘OK CHICOS, AGREED,’ said El Jerarca, drawing upon his cigar and obscuring himself behind the smoke, ‘do a good job and have a good time, OK?’

  Anica was walking home in the perpetual rain, carrying her portfolio of designs that seemed to be growing at the same pace as the infant inside her, when El Guacamayo and El Chiquitin drew alongside her in an old Ford Falcon, and El Chiquitin threw open the passenger door. He called to her, ‘Hey, flaca,’ and when she turned, she saw that he was pointing a submachine gun at her and was beckoning to her to get into the car. She momentarily considered flight, but it was if she felt that she was a prey to inevitability. She got into the car and El Chiquitin poked the gun into her neck: ‘Fun time,’ he said, and El Guacamayo laughed at the back of his throat and felt himself already growing tumescent.

  They taunted Anica. ‘Hey, flaca, guess what we are going to do. Hey, flaca, guess why. Maybe you don’t know? Guess who saw Vivo and broke our little bargain? So guess who pays the forfeit, little flaca? Is it your Daddy, flaca? No, it isn’t, because guess whose Daddy set it up all along
, flaca, and we don’t seriously intend to kill the man who sells us our toys, do we? Oh no. It would be cruel. It wouldn’t make sense. But we’ll tell you a little secret, flaca, OK? We think Daddy needs to learn a lesson, don’t we? We think Daddy’s been passing on information to Vivo now and then, don’t we? And I’ll tell you, flaca, we thought it over. We thought, “Why should precious papa suffer when it was you who broke the deal?” Would that be fair? No it would not. And we are very fair, aren’t we, flaca? We act only with justice. And I’ll tell you another thing, flaca, we like to enjoy ourselves a little now and then, and we thought, “Hey, isn’t a young chica more fun than an old man?” And we thought, yes, all things considered, she is, so why not?’

  Anica clutched her portfolio of designs that were to have made her famous, went numb inside, and could not think of anything at all. ‘But I am pregnant,’ she said.

  El Guacamayo laughed so as to show off his gold canine teeth, and said, ‘Ay, if we had known that, we would have brought along a white cockerel, eh compañero?’ And EI Chiquitin replied, ‘Si, cabron, we would have brought a nice white cockerel.”

  There is a disease that affects carnations. It lies dormant in the soil for decades, and then suddenly erupts and destroys all the carnation crop over the area that it infests. When this happens, there is nothing to be done but burn the crops, abandon the greenhouses, and desert the land forever. Ambush is ever the way in which ugliness destroys beauty.