Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  Anica and Dionisio were aware of the women’s presence and their purpose from the very beginning, but it seemed to them that it all had nothing to do with their daily life or their love affair. Dionisio thought of them only with a sense of the quizzicality of the world, and Anica only rarely felt endangered by them, when he made dirty jokes about them or pretended that he was about to go and see them. Like everyone else, other than the classicists, Anica and Dionisio referred to them as ‘Las Locas’.

  29 Valledupar

  AT LAST THE time came for them to make the arduous journey to Valledupar, a city so frivolous that the natives hang pineapples on lemon trees just to confuse the tourists, and the same place that General Fuerte’s donkey had once given birth to kittens. It was also the root and foundation stone of the burgeoning movement towards local democracy in the nation, and had been ever since Dionisio’s father, General Hernando Montes Sosa, had called an election and confirmed his position as governor without resort to electoral fraud. From that town had set out the military expeditions to quell the imaginary communist insurgencies in the region of Chiriguana, which itself was inundated in the spectacular flood which resulted in the discovery of the ancient Inca city named by Aurelio as Cochadebajo de los Gatos.

  The couple loaded the antique vehicle with their possessions. It was a notably sultry and lugubrious day, and they sweated in rivers on account of their fetching and carrying. They loaded numerous musical instruments so that Dionisio might compose songs and play to himself, and soon found that there was not much room for anything else. Then they decided to take Anica’s Norton because Dionisio wanted her to be independent if she wished. This proved to be an impossibility on account of its size and asymmetrical shape, until they had the inspiration of tying it to the roof with ropes that came through the windows. This meant that they could not open the doors any more, and so they had to enter and leave the car by climbing through the windows themselves.

  As the couple began the two-day excursion down to the torrid Llanos, Dionisio had the sensation that one of his lives was ending and that nothing would ever be the same again. For the first time that he could recollect he had been sublimely happy for several months without interruption, he was strong and bulging with health, and he had realised with astonishment that he was young. It had been a very long time since the days when he had woken up each morning unable to decide whether or not he had died during the night. Anica in her turn had forgotten to cry about her mother’s death for several months.

  The drive to Dionisio’s home was largely uneventful except for his car’s token protests. It burst a water hose at one point, and at another the distributor worked loose so that the engine backfired abruptly and stopped. The worst thing, however, was that the home-made silencer began to come off after hitting a hump in the road, and the racket made conversation very difficult. Apart from this, the roads were in their usual state of grotesque deformation, full of potholes, ravaged by floods, so that only drunks would keep to one side of the highway, and only optimists such as Dionisio ever expected to arrive anywhere.

  Down on the Llanos everything was different. Down here the cattle were not sleek and fat as in the sierra, but were bloated with parasites and afflicted with picturesque despair. The cats were not philosopical and elegant, but scabby and dishonest. The grasses were not lush and generous, but paltry, and seared by a heat that distorted the view in every direction, had such a radical effect upon the metabolism that it was necessary to urinate only once a day, in the evenings, and made it possible to bake cassava bread by simply leaving it on the roof. The humidity was so profound that not even the famous saunas of Finland could rival it for the sensation of being a prisoner in one’s own body, which in turn felt as though wrapped in a sodden military blanket. The adobe and palm-thatched huts of the poor pueblitos seemed each one to have a buzzard or a vulture perched upon the roof in the posture of bored sentries from a conscript army. In each doorway there seemed to be the same bundles of ragged clothes surmounted by the inscrutable faces of their occupants, always with a large puro clenched in the teeth, and often with a dirty child hanging on with one hand and eating guava jelly with the other.

  They stopped by a lemon grove for the night and slung Dionisio’s Acahuatec hammock between two trees. The night had cooled the world to a balmy temperature and there was no sign of rain, so they sat amongst the trees listening to the redskin monkeys and watching the fireflies while they drank coffee and talked about whether or not bats could spread rabies. When they climbed into the hammock there were comical episodes caused by the fact that it is very difficult to get into a hammock two at a time without suddenly being tipped out. Anica lay across the hammock crossways to stabilise it so that he could come up as well, and they discovered empirically a secret known to Indians for centuries, which is that it is easiest to make love in a hammock by lying in it diagonally. They slept a guiltless and profound sleep, and woke up in the morning swollen with bites, but already reaped and harvested by the sun.

  They drove at furious speed to keep the air circulating in the car, and also to get to Puesto Grande by four o’clock in order to see the famous mechanical negro in the town clock sally out and strike the bell with a hammer. On the hour the little mechanical negro was propelled unsteadily from out of his alcove and hesitantly banged on the bell four times before retreating backwards again. They felt a sense of anti-climax as one often does with technological wonders, but went into the Miami Motel to celebrate nonetheless. In the bar, which was full of chickens and where there lived a monopolising hog that ate cigarette-ends and cigar butts, Anica said ‘Do you think that we are both locos?’

  As they neared his parental home he began to feel a warm sensation growing in his body. Even though the family had originated in Ipasueño, the General had been resident in Cesar for so long now that Dionisio regarded Valledupar as his real home, especially as its quirkiness and eccentricity suited his nature almost to perfection, despite the stupefying heat and catastrophic rainstorms, the ravenous and insatiable insects and the intrusively raucous darktime chirring of the crickets.

  His parents now lived in a neo-colonial mansion with peeling paint and cool courtyards. There was a reconstruction of the original Aristotelian peripateticon draped with bougainvillea, and a vast garden that his horticultural mother had turned into a beneficent forest by marking every important event with the planting of a tree, which meant that they suffered from a prodigious surfeit of avocados, guavas and citrus. The General was used to organising military fatigue squads to collect these up in baskets; these he would place in front of the guards at the gates with orders to give them away for nothing to poor women and to hungry travellers.

  The house itself possessed the air of a place reconciled to time. It spoke of the recollection of glittering celebrations and presidential visits; it was a house that had gone into genteel retirement in order to cultivate roses and relax upon its foundations without any bitterness or regret. In its hallways were family portraits, including one of the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, complete with a hole in his nose which, out of a feeling of vengefulness against the portrait’s stern and reproachful expression, the General had put there in his youth with the aid of an air-rifle. On the walls were a collection of swords, pikes and muskets from the colonial age, and there was a clock so old that it dated from the time when no one was so hurried that they felt it necessary to have a minute hand. One of the family cats had once got into the habit of dropping live mice into the mechanism, where there was now a small but thriving colony that had mastered the art of knowing the precise times when it was essential to avoid the various pieces of machinery.

  Dionisio’s family was an old one with a documented history that gave each member of it the reassuring feeling that they had the right to exist. The General himself was so enmeshed in the family traditions that he sometimes forgot which century he was in and had to be reminded by his wife. He possessed a conciliatory frame of mind and a puzzled expression, and
supervised his own emotions with a military sense of order coupled with a discreet humanity.

  Dionisio’s mother on the other hand showed every sign of once having been a fan of Carmen Miranda, a fact principally betrayed by her coiffure, which she had not changed since her youth and which still became her now as it had then. She was a paradoxical vegetarian who delighted in serving up succulent roast meats, which she would watch her family eat with voracity while she herself toyed with Spartan portions of braised vegetables. She had a gift for embarrassingly acute naivety and always understood other people better than those acquainted with the gloomy metaphysic of psychology or the equally pessimistic one of Christianity. She was a fanatical connoisseur of obscure superstitions, which she practised assiduously as a kind of hobby, without believing in any of them. Her husband was convinced that she had been born a century too early, since she was known throughout the area as a rescuer of wounded animals and birds; he believed that a civilisation can be judged by its treatment of animals, and he calculated that it would be a hundred years before the rest of the nation treated animals as well as she did, an hypothesis he had worked out with the aid of statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and a large graph which was now framed and hung in a corridor, next to all the pictures of the units with which he had served.

  When the couple arrived and passed the inspections of the guards at the gate, they drew up in front of the house and were still climbing stickily out of the windows of the car when they were deluged by a welcoming committee consisting of servants, the General, the family pets, and all the other wounded animals who joined in out of a need not to be excluded. The General kissed his son on both cheeks and enclosed him in a martial hug, and then gallantly kissed Anica upon both cheeks as well, uttering well-chosen compliments and congratulating Dionisio upon having found such a tall lady. Mama Julia appeared from the house and embraced everybody, including her own husband, and summed up Anica’s character with one glance. In the evening she informed her son that she loved Anica already, because of her purity of soul. Dionisio explained at enormous length all of her virtues and attractions, and Mama Julia snorted and said, ‘That is exactly what I said, except that I needed only one phrase.’

  Anica fell immediately into the routine of the house, and Dionisio slipped instantaneously back into the role in the family decreed for him by fate, which was to be the only one out of all the household (including the servants, whom his parents treated like honoured guests) who had the courage and lack of imagination to clean up catshit, get rid of snakes and spiders, despatch maimed birds, and catch rodents that had been let go in the house accidentally.

  30 His Excellency’s Alchemical Assault

  EVER SINCE HIS Excellency and his wife had begun the practice of sexual alchemy, the former had taken great pains to ensure that his performance was underpinned by adequate metabolical foundations.

  On this day of his implacable revenge against El Jerarca he had consumed litres of tea made from damiana specially flown in from Mexico. This efficacious herb not only possesses aphrodisiac qualities, but has similar effects to marijuana upon the psyche, which His Excellency also found to be an excellent source of erotic predispositions. On days when he practised his hermetic mysteries he was usually not in a fit state to govern the country, and consequently his office would be closed while he ambled about the palace gesticulating and murmuring to himself, as untoward events perpetrated themselves within the sealed doors of his altered consciousness.

  His Excellency also consumed prodigious quantities of guarana and catuaba, which he had brought in from the Amazonas region, where an Indian chief had introduced them to him during one of his rare presidential visits to the interior. This induced an excellent state of affairs in both mind and body which almost rendered the ginseng and the vast doses of vitamin E superfluous.

  His Excellency had recently heard that in the United States it was possible to be fitted with a curious device; this device was an hydraulic sac that could be fitted within the erectile tissues of the penis. In the abdomen, at the end of a tube, was a reservoir of inert liquid, and in the scrotum was a pump. All that one had to do was squeeze the scrotum in a discreet but vigorous manner, and the fluid would flow from the reservoir to the penis, erecting it magnificently, and all one had to do to detumesce with the dignity of a king was to palpate the pump in the correct fashion. It occurred to His Excellency that theoretically it should be possible to perform sexual alchemy continuously with this device installed. He had already sent off for the brochures, under an assumed name, and the two reasons that he had never got around to having the miraculous operation were that in the first place the pressure of executive business was too great, and secondly the thought of having an incision made in his penis filled him with irrational horror. The ingenuity and the humanitarian nature of the concept, however, altogether changed his perception of the United States, and he began to regard that enterprising country as a model of civilisation. This predisposed him to a greater sympathy towards the demands of their government that something should be done to crush the coca cartels.

  President Veracruz and his amenable wife spent the whole day attempting not to think about sex, in order not to dissipate any psycho-sexual energies that might be useful later during copulation. The attempt not to think about it concentrated their attention upon it in the most paradoxical manner, and this explains why it was that they frequently slapped themselves in the face in order that the pain should prove a distraction. (Rumours and reports that he and his spouse were mad should be confounded by this explanation, and the Mind of the Nation should be set at rest.)

  In the early evening when the moon was full, and shining directly into the windows of the highest boudoir in the land, His Excellency and Señora Veracruz took a bath and carefully washed each other all over in order to irrigate away not only the daily grime of high office, but also the invisible spiritual contagions that are a fact of daily life. They dried themselves in towels freshly laundered in Andean spring water, guaranteed to be free of all chemicals and industrial additives, obtainable on the Calle Fernando in bottles from Erasmo Hidalgo’s Emporium, Purveyors of Rare Artefacts and Recondite Luxuries.

  The ceremony having become refined over the years, the couple then robed themselves in their respective chambers. His Excellency emerged as Osiris, complete with the atef crown, which looked somewhat like a very large white condom with a vast green worm at front and back. Pasted to his chin was a long waxed beard which curled forward at the bottom, and his body was swathed in a white robe that was designed to resemble the bandages of a mummy, Osiris being not only the God of Resurrection but also the God of the Judgement of the Dead. In his hands he bore the crook and flail, and upon his countenance he wore an expression of the most prodigiously earnest loftiness of purpose.

  Señora Veracruz emerged as a very fetching likeness of Isis. In her hand she bore a sistrum, and upon her head was an impressive confection consisting of a pair of elegantly curved cow’s horns encompassing a burnished solar disk. Upon her forehead was the upper neck and head of a taxidermised cobra, and a lock of hair fell in front of her ears in authentic style. Around her long black wig she wore a gold band, her throat was adorned with an ornamented necklet, and on her upper arms and her wrists she carried triple bracelets. Her slender body was encased in a sheathlike white strapless dress, her feet were bare, and her eyes were made, by means of a black pencil, into superb likenesses of the eyes of Horus.

  Their giant black jaguar, being the first of their magical children, was brought into the room with a red collar sparkling with gems, and in this way the atmosphere of authenticity could be augmented by having present a beast that could pass either for the Goddess Sekhmet or the Goddess Bast. This impressive animal curled up on the rug and fell asleep during the ritual that followed.

  The couple, having assumed the form and therefore the powers of their respective divinities, stood opposite each other and placed their hands upon each other’s shoulder
s. They then intoned with great conviction and solemnity the entire forty-two verses of the noble Protestation of Innocence, which is to be found in all reputable declensions of the Book of The Dead.

  Having recited this with the aid of the entire text pinned up on the wall as an aide-memoire, Señora Veracruz announced to her spouse, ‘You are my King, you are the Risen Osiris, you are my priest,’ at which point he uncrossed his arms that had been resting upon his chest in the sign of Osiris Dead, and raised them up, palm outwards, in the sign of Osiris Living.

  He then declared, ‘You are my Queen, you are the Living Isis, you are my priestess.’

  They undressed each other where they stood, resisting the temptation to ungodlike haste, and sank down upon the bed. There followed a lengthy period in which they caressed each other in all apposite areas with the utmost languor, occasionally stopping for refreshment in the form of freezing champagne, which the French Ambassador had once recommended as a very potent aid to erotic enterprise. This gentleman maintained that there is at the base of the stomach a flap which closes whenever something very cold enters it. When the temperature is more amenable to digestion the flap opens and dumps all the champagne at once into the gut, which explains its exhilarating effects.

  When they could bear the tantalisation no longer and the correct ambience for mystical copulation had been created, Señora Veracruz lowered herself upon the presidential polla with divine aplomb, and employed the most subtle and exquisite Panamanian muscular contractions to keep them both on the brink of explosion for a very lengthy period of time. Whenever His Excellency felt the urge to melt into orgasm he would contemplate his wife’s extraordinary headdress, and found that this had the effect of bringing him back from the precipice.

  During this sublimest of rituals there were always some interesting paranormal phenomena caused by the intensity of the concentration and the magnificence of the bliss. Upon this occasion the huge black jaguar levitated, and slept on in its curled-up posture fully one metre from the ground, and the hands of the palace clocks bent at right-angles. In addition the room filled with the aroma of asafoetida and toasted cumin, and Señora Veracruz distinctly felt the hands of an angel running up and down her back.