Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  They still indulge their tastes too; just look at Francesca, who today is Yemaya, on her hands and knees looking everywhere for cockroaches to cram into her mouth. She is eating them with a delight that is almost too sensual, and it is making Chango feel aroused. The other Orishas are trying to prevent her, because, as everyone knows, they employ cockroaches as their messengers.

  24 Anica’s Journal (1)

  DIONISIO’S FAN LETTERS are increasing at a surprising rate as the days go by. They increased from two on the second day to two sackfuls in the second week, so that we cannot really keep up with the work of reading them. We have been classifying them into three piles, one for letters of support, one for declarations of Platonic love, and the other for declarations of carnal intent. These letters are all forwarded through the good offices of La Prensa, who have written to D. and told him that they are processing them in their usual way through their X-ray machine. They say they have found fifteen letters packed with plastic explosive, and four gifts of booby-trapped alarm clocks.

  We composed a universal letter of tactful rejection for those who desire his child, and a universal letter of sincere appreciation for the others, and had one thousand of each printed at a discount by the printers who normally produce all that propaganda for the four communist parties of differing views who are always attacking each other. It has cost D. so much in postage that in the end I lent him the money to bribe that man at the town hall to process them through the municipal franking machine.

  I am beginning to find all this very threatening and uncomfortable, and so is D., I think. Last night in bed he suddenly got frightened and said to me, ‘Anica, I sometimes have the terrible sensation that I am merely a part of your history.’

  I was startled, and I said to him, ‘Oh querido, what does that mean?’ even though I sort of knew what he meant already.

  He looked at me and I think he did not say what he meant, because he said, ‘All the people that I knew when I was your age are now just a part of my history.’

  I think that maybe at last he is taking all these threats seriously, and has some premonitions (too strong a word – ‘intimations’ is a better word, the kind that he likes to use) of death. I wanted to cry for some reason, and I said, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that I might just be a part of your history?’ His eyes were glowing in the dark, and I think they would not have glowed like that if he had not been almost crying himself. I was leaning over him and he touched me and said, ‘Your breast is like a nocturnal animal, I will always remember the way that it is brushing against my chest.’ It was just as if he was about to say goodbye. I have started praying for the first time since Mama died.

  Yesterday we had a strange experience. We were just walking along when we saw an Aymara Indian (what is an Aymara doing around here?). He was in full national dress and had trenzas, and he had that proud look about him that makes you feel too unimportant to be worth knowing. He was with a very tall old negro who had more muscles than would seem possible, but he had a nice face and grey hair, and he had one of those campesino machetes with the leather tassels on the sheath. The strange thing was that they both were leading a huge black jaguar on a string.

  There were some people there, and they all scattered as if they had seen the devil. But D. is crazy about animals and I swear he is telepathic with them. I have lost count of the times that dogs have just come up to him, and once I met him in the plaza and he was sitting on a wall with a cat on his knee, and two horses and a burro and three dogs all there as well. I keep telling him that he will get fleas and rabies one of these days, but he laughs at me. I think he enjoys getting on with animals because it is one of the things that makes the people around here believe that he is some kind of sorcerer.

  As soon as D. saw the jaguars he got terribly excited. I tried to stop him but he just walked up and introduced himself to the Indian and the negro. The negro was someone called Misael, but my heart jumped when I heard that the Indian was Aurelio, who is famous for sorcery around here. They say that he cures even cancers, and they say that the cats of Cochadebajo de los Gatos were a kind of unexpected side-effect of one of his healing sessions. Everyone is terrified of him, including me.

  D. asked him if the cats were two of the famous tame black jaguars of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. The negro, Misael, just nodded, but the Indian, Aurelio, sort of narrowed his eyes and took a deep suck on his coca pestle. I am trying to remember exactly what he said. It was something like, ‘You are in three kinds of danger.’ D. laughed and said, ‘Everyone says that, but I believe none of it,’ and Aurelio narrowed his eyes again and said, ‘One is that you think you know everything, which is what causes the second danger, which is that you will not understand anything, and the third danger is that death will come in the wrong place, and unexpectedly.’

  I could see from D’s smile that he wanted to ridicule the old man, and I was truly frightened that he would. D. pretends that he only believes in what he can see or touch, but I know that that is a fraud. I know him better than that. Thank God he did not ridicule him, but he started to talk about those cats. He said, ‘Why do you lead the cats on a string too weak to hold them?’ and Misael explained that it was because when people see the cats walking behind, they think that they are stalking the two of them, and the people shoot at the cats, so they keep the cats on a string to show that they are with them and not hunting them. I didn’t put that very well.

  D. looked at the cats, and I just knew that he was going to go down on his knees and stroke them. I nearly shit myself. Those cats were so huge, and one of them was licking its lips, and they say that only someone who knows the cats already or is a brujo can safely stroke them. I tried to pull him back, but he did just as I thought he would, and I called him a fool, but he did it anyway.

  He put a hand on each of the cats’ heads and he talked to them as though they were children, saying ‘How are you?’ and things like that. One of them licked his hand, and he looked up at me with that triumphant grin of his and he said, ‘This cat likes my salt.’ He scratched the other one under the chin and round the ears, and then it went up on its back legs and put its feet on his shoulders. D. fell over backwards, and I seriously thought for a second that it was going to rip his throat out. I didn’t know what to do, and truly I nearly did shit myself all over again, but the next thing I see D. is rolling around in the road having a wrestling game with that monster, and he is laughing away like he is being tickled. Then he just stands up and nods at the two men, and comes back to me as though nothing had happened, except that all the way home he kept going on about the way the cats smelled fusty and sweet, that it was a beautiful smell, and on and on.

  Anyway, before we left I distinctly heard Misael say to Aurelio, ‘Is that the man?’ and the Indian said, ‘Yes, that is the man.’ I thought that they wanted me to hear because otherwise they would have waited, wouldn’t they?

  The news of what D. did certainly spread fast, because today everyone in town was crossing themselves when we walked past, and saying prayers and despachos. D. didn’t know anything about Aurelio at all, and when I explained who he was and what he does he just laughed at me and made me feel stupid. I am beginning to think that D. doesn’t understand anything about himself. He is like a priest who does not know that he believes in God, or something. He scares me sometimes. I asked him if he had seen the beautiful daughter with the ocelot who often goes around with Aurelio, but who is invisible to ordinary people, and he just made me feel stupid again.

  I am very tired and very confused. Sometimes I wonder what I am doing with D. I must be mad. Everyone tells me that it is suicide to go around with him, and yet I stay with him even though I know that they are right. I love him, but I haven’t told him that yet, and yet even though we are sweethearts we never discuss the dangers or even the coca trade when we are together. I think that for him it is a solitary kind of passion, and I don’t dare to try to challenge him over it, even though I always get my way in everything else. />
  People are telling me that D. really is a brujo, and that is why he has me under his spell. I laugh at them and make them feel stupid, just as D. does to me, but there is so much that puzzles me and makes me think. I swear that he really did grow enormous when he nearly killed those thieves, or certainly he looked as though he did, and I can’t understand why he gets away with the way he plays with dangerous animals, and the other thing is that whenever he touches me it is like a little electric shock. And why are his hands always so warm?

  This is the end of the tenth volume of my diary, and five of them I have written in the time that I have been with D. I haven’t written so much since I took the baccalaureat.

  25 El Jerarca

  EL JERARCA WAS having problems. In the first place, although he was only fifty-two years old he was already beginning to suffer the inevitable doubts and insecurities of old age. He had himself examined by his doctors once upon rising in the mornings and once upon retiring at night, and having learned from a lifetime of double-dealing that no one could be trusted, he never believed what they told him, so that he would imagine symptoms that he did not have, and then look them up in a medical encyclopaedia, so that eventually he exhausted the possibilities and had to start all over again.

  His doctors told him that a lifetime of over-eating had corrupted his digestive system to such an extent that it no longer mattered what he ate. They told him that he was so overweight that as a matter of humanity he should give up riding his famous grey stallion, which had taken up a bowed appearance in its back and had become too depressed to be put out to stud. They told him that his heart was so inflated and distorted that its clockwork only continued to function out of being too unimaginative to stop. They told him that he should discontinue his practice of making love at least once a day, but were repeatedly reminded by him that at the age of twenty-one he had made an irrevocable vow that not one day should pass without at least one bout of intercourse, and that it was a matter of personal honour. He was also privately convinced that if he gave up the practice it would diminish the lustre of his personal legend and cause a proportional diminution of his power over his organisation. His doctors told him that his repeated doses of venereal maladies had weakened his immune system to such an extent that the only reason that he was not bedridden was that his body now lacked the mechanisms for manifesting symptoms. His doctors considered that his flesh was so rotten that in private they had organised a betting system amongst themselves as to whether or not he would begin to be consumed by maggots before he had actually died.

  Apart from the decrepitude of his body, he was also suffering the anxiety of knowing that despite his incalculable wealth he was marching towards death in the certain knowledge that he would die unloved and unrespected and unlamented; that his death was already being preceded by a gathering of vultures; that finally his life had been more meaningless and less satisfactory than that of a congenital moron without limbs and without reproductive organs.

  This unhappiness caused him to become ever crueller, as though cruelty could prove that he had a hold on life, and he began to be caught between a fantasy of immortality and a blossoming love-affair with his own prospective death. But as his cruelty augmented, his grip upon the means of cruelty was faltering.

  And this was all because of the accursed and quixotic Dionisio Vivo, who had stirred both the fears and the conscience of the political elite to such an extent that even his most assiduous receivers of gratuities within that elite had begun to become miraculously difficult to contact even when the size of their gratuities was increased. They continued to accept his inducements, but the goods were never delivered. El Jerarca was also aware that all over the country Dionisio Vivo societies were springing up and organising pressure groups which were threatening not to re-elect any officials who did not take concrete action against the cartels in their districts, so that the business of keeping everything ticking over quietly was becoming increasingly problematical. He was completely unaware that Dionisio Vivo had really very little to do with this, because he failed to recognise that in fact an ardent longing for order and peace had already been growing in the country for years, after the bloody exhilarations of civil wars and rampant gangsterism had finally begun to lose their appeal. In other words a certain maturity of civilisation had manifested itself and had hooked onto Dionisio Vivo’s letters like a creeper in the jungle which had finally produced white blossoms and havens for tiny hummingbirds and morpho butterflies.

  But El Jerarca blamed Dionisio Vivo personally. Nonetheless, for the first time in his life he was powerless, for his men were either refusing outright to do away with him, or were pretending to go after him and then finding excuses for having failed. Those who refused he shot down in his own office, but now it was becoming difficult to summon his lieutenants precisely because of that, and they always sent messengers to say that they were just setting off on a mission that he himself had ordered them to perform but which he could not remember having commanded them to do. He started to wonder whether his own memory was failing or whether he was the victim of a conspiracy to make him think that it was.

  The problem was no more nor less than the conviction in the minds of his men that Dionisio Vivo was an invulnerable sorcerer. One of his men had encountered the two thieves by coincidence when visiting Guaraguana and had come back with the story of Dionisio Vivo’s fearsome ability to grow gigantic and break people apart like sticks of candy, and it was well known that he was a master of invisibility, could overwhelm magnetic force without thinking about it, and was able to disport himself with the mythological black jaguars of Cochadebajo de los Gatos in front of Aurelio the Brujo himself. It had been greatly put about that anyone attempting to wound him would suffer in his own body the wounds intended for the other.

  El Jerarca was himself a superstitious man; he felt the necessity to go to Mass every Sunday and to go to confession, not because he was possessed of a genuine sense of religious awe nor a personal intuition of the parenthood of God, but because he had always done so since a child, and felt that it would be bad luck to stop, especially in a country where the mere fact of going to church was commonly taken to be the outward and visible sign of perfect purity of soul. For the iniquities he had committed either personally or by proxy he rattled off Ave Marias in much the same spirit as an Irishman spits upon seeing a magpie or an Englishman bows three times to the new moon, turns his money over in his pocket, and performs a pirouette. Having confessed his crimes to priests in gilded robes who did not bother even to listen, he always enjoyed the sensation of having had his slate wiped clean so that he could begin to write upon it anew, and this was the nearest he ever came to spiritual refreshment or moral renewal.

  El Jerarca was as superstitious as all men are who live in perpetual insecurity and distrust; he always rode only a grey stallion, always drank from the same mug, and always looked under his bed before climbing into it. He had a significant collection of talismans and amulets against every foreseeable eventuality, and had his tame priests bless them every year on the day of the Feast of St Michael and All Angels to insure them against loss of efficacy. Thus the voodoo fetishes, shrunken heads, and morsels of dehydrated animal from Brazil had the nature spirits within them annually subjected to the confusing ordeal of being sanctified by a faith that explicitly excoriated them.

  Because he was superstitious and because he had begun to believe the stories told about Dionisio Vivo he became reluctant to carry on ordering him to be killed, mainly on account of the statement of one of his priests that to cause another to commit a crime was the same as committing it oneself. He reasoned therefore that if wounds appeared in the body of the assailant which were intended for Dionisio Vivo, then the same wounds would appear in his own body as would appear in that of the immediate perpetrator of the crime. He therefore caused to be constructed a large bullet-proof steel box, covered it with dedicated altar cloths, and had it censed and then blessed by his priests in the name of the Fath
er, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and St Barbara for good measure. His intention was to sit inside it during the moments when Dionisio Vivo was to be shot, so that no bullets visible or invisible could harm him at the critical moment. All that remained for him to do was to offer someone so much money to do it that greed would overcome the fear of instantaneous retribution. It turned out to be nearly the biggest hit-money that anyone had ever offered in Hispano-America, because no one would do it for any less. And even despite this, it took the young man several days to bring himself to attempt the assassination.

  Anica and Dionisio were due to meet Ramon just before sunset so that they could all have a meal together, but they were very early, so they went on a little paseo just to observe the custom and to see if anything was happening. Anica said that she had just heard that she had been accepted by the university, and he was angry when she said that she would take a room in a student hall, because he knew that they guarded the chastity of the inmates as though they were royal virgins. She said she had already checked it out and that it was very easy to break the rules, especially at weekends. He recovered his temper and told her that it was a good idea to go in a hall because one made a very great many instant friends, and he was happy as long as it did not interfere with their affair. She skipped ahead, pulling him by the hand, and she said, ‘And why should it?’ He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away, calling him an ‘old bastard’ and saying that she knew too many people around there, so he said, ‘It is not that, it is that you are too shy.’ Then he said, ‘Would you mind if I applied to do a Master’s degree at the university? I was offered a place years ago and I never took it up. Would you think I was chasing after you too hard?’ Anica laughed and said, ‘No, I would like it very much.’ He said, ‘This is the first thing I have had for many years that I want to preserve. We should never let this rot away.’