Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  When this happened she could restrain herself no longer and she broke into a climax so shattering that her headdress of cowhorns and solar disk flew from her head, and that of His Excellency fell forward over his eyes. But this did not distract them from their supreme concentration, for at the moment of supernal disintegration they were visualising with all their power their longed-for ‘magical child’, which was the sudden death of El Jerarca.

  Afterwards, when the great cat had crashed suddenly to the floor and all the clocks in the palace had lost ten minutes, Señora Veracruz lay sobbing and panting in her husband’s arms. ‘Oh Daddikins,’ she cried, ‘I want more,’ at which point an expression of dismay passed over his face and he thought all over again about having the operation.

  31 Guacamole Sauce And The Naked Admiral

  MAMA JULIA WAS scandalised by the creaking of the floorboards at night as the lovers flitted to each other’s rooms under the impression that the noise of the excusado flushing and the chirring of crickets would drown out the sound. But the General said, ‘Shit, woman, it is perfectly obvious that they have been married longer than we have,’ and so she held her peace, and generously colluded in the respectable pretence that all nights in her house were nights of Catholic chastity.

  Mama Julia and the General departed on their own holiday, to Costa Rica, and did as custom dictated, which was to summon La Prima Primavera to take charge of the house. No one knew exactly who she was or whether she was in fact a cousin or not, but she had been a member of the family for so long that it no longer mattered if she was an impostor, or even if she was really herself or somebody else. Mama Julia was convinced that even with a squad of servants Dionisio was incapable of taking care of things, and would have been very put out if she had ever discovered that he could. La Prima Primavera was a Zamba woman in her late sixties, who had devoted her youth to outrageous promiscuity and her old age to finding a husband. She suffered from a personality disorder which no doctor would ever have been able to cure, which was that she could not understand jokes, despite having an earthy and risqué sense of humour and a disconcerting habit of uttering obscenities. Less seriously, she always put the wrong answers in Mama Julia’s books of crosswords in indelible ink, causing Mama Julia many moments of despairing rage until she got into the habit of remembering to hide the books in a trunk before she arrived. La Prima Primavera was inquisitive about everything, but paradoxically never seemed to know about anything; she took offence when none was intended, and did not take it when it was, but she shared with Mama Julia a gift for caring for wounded animals, and she shared with her a weary sense of the inevitable whenever Dionisio brought a girlfriend home. But she fell instantly under Anica’s spell, and forgot to feel bitter whenever they embraced. Dionisio told Anica that La Prima Primavera had had a passion for lamb in guacamole sauce ever since she had worked in Mexico, and that she could expect them to have it served every day, a prophecy which was accurately fulfilled.

  After La Prima Primavera had arrived, laden with suitcases that seemed to be filled with lead and compressed igneous rock, and after the General and Mama Julia had departed, there began the time when Dionisio and Anica were at their happiest. Anica suddenly threw away all her inhibitions as if they had been ragged clothes. She held his hand in public, kissed him voraciously before the very eyes of the guardians of public decency, and accepted at last that each of them was better together than either of them could have been apart.

  With the parents away and La Prima Primavera at the other end of the house snoring and swearing whilst she dreamed of camels with lions’ heads copulating with the President, it was an easy matter to slip into each other’s rooms without even having to flush the excusado first. Anica would be waiting under the mosquito net, getting younger by the day, making all those expressions that preceded acts of love. She would bite her lower lip and raise her eyebrows, while her eyes went luminous with the anticipation of pleasure.

  They would lie at first side by side, allowing the day to slide away and allowing the interpenetration of their bodies’ warmth and mustiness, until it was time for their hands to seek to wander. Then would begin the journeys of the tongue and lips, he over her long limbs, she over his rougher savannahs, until at last they would be fast asleep, exhausted and contented, while the frustrated mosquitoes coated the net with a black vibrating mass that would always unaccountably disappear at dawn.

  One evening they went to see the Naked Admiral. He was a friend of the family who was responsible for naval recruitment in the whole department, which was why he found himself hundreds of kilometres from the sea with almost nothing to do except construct follies in his gardens. He was an ardent naturist and had shared with the former Governor, General Fuerte, a patriotic interest in ornithology and lepidoptery. In his youth he had formulated the theory that sperm production is reduced by the wearing of clothes, and he had never since worn any except when off his own property, a fact which meant that his wife never dared to have dinner parties or invite dignitaries to stay. Surprisingly, this lack of hospitality never slowed the Naked Admiral’s promotion, as it would have done in the army, or in the armed forces of a country such as Great Britain, for example. When the Naked Admiral eventually became completely senile he went naked the whole time and would drive away from his house as nature had intended him to be, with no idea of where he was going and with no idea of where he had been when he came back. His silver-haired wife died of mortification, and finally he was put into a nursing home where his nakedness was not an embarrassment to anyone. In that benign establishment he would greet people at the door with rapturous politesse and the impression that he was the owner of it and was holding a perpetual party, thus recompensing himself for a lifetime without social gatherings at his home in Valledupar. He was to die with a serene expression and a priapic erection that testihed to the validity of his juvenile hypotheses about sperm-production.

  The Naked Admiral had summoned Dionisio because he knew that he was always looking for work in the academic holidays, and he was in love with the idea of having his follies constructed by a moderately well-known philosopher. On this occasion his thoughts had turned to death, and he had resolved to have built a pyramidal mausoleum exactly the same as that commissioned by Mad Jack Fuller, the British Member of Parliament for Rose Hill from 1801 to 1812. This famous man was a particular hero of the Naked Admiral, who had already constructed a domed rotunda, an anchoritic tower, an obelisk, and a church spire without a church, in imitation of the volatile Englishman. Dionisio and Anica looked at the plans, with the Naked Admiral pointing out its features with the aid of a thick forefinger that somehow appeared to be even more naked than the rest of him, and Dionisio saw straight away the impossibility of imitating it. He pointed out that there was no local supply of stone, and that it was so tall that he would need to construct scaffolding out of canes and planks, which would add to the cost. The Naked Admiral thought for a moment and agreed that it should be constructed out of tapiales rendered with adobe, and that it needed to be only high enough for him to be able to sit in it naked when he was dead, wearing a top hat and holding a bottle of claret in his right hand.

  ‘Do you know why the Ingles refused to be buried in the normal manner, Dionisio? It was because he said he would be eaten by worms, and the worms would be eaten by ducks, and the ducks would be eaten by his relatives. He was afraid of such incestuous cannibalism, you understand. And another thing, I want the floor to be covered with broken glass so that when the devil comes for me, he will cut his feet.’

  The Naked Admiral’s wife appeared, bearing cups of guarapo and slices of pineapple. She was a silver-haired lady whose cheeks were permanently flushed with embarrassment on her husband’s behalf. She felt the obligation to make up for him by affecting exquisitely old-fashioned manners. She would break into compliments so lyrical and embroidered that some people thought that she was sarcastic, others that she was being ironical, and others were reminded of funeral orations over the
catafalques of national heroes. She had been engaged for years in a shadowy academic project that took up nearly all her time, and would speak at length about her archival delvings without ever intimating the subject of her burrowing. When, after her death, her papers were finally sorted, it transpired that she had for twenty years been collecting and collating all references to rabbits in European literature since the time of the Romans. Her executors never found out what she had been on the point of proving when she had died of mortification at her desk with her pen in her hand, and the word ‘Conclusion’ written at the head of an otherwise blank sheet of paper.

  When they left the house, Anica and Dionisio discussed whether or not the old couple were mad and came to the decision that they gave the impression of being two perfectly sane people with a lot of money and very little to do.

  As they went home, and Dionisio was already thinking about the details of the construction of the mausoleum, Anica said with wonder in her voice what she had been longing to say ever since she had first clapped furtive eyes on the Naked Admiral. ‘Did you notice that his polla has a big kink in it?’

  32 The Firedance (1)

  HE WAS CALLED ‘Lazaro’, but his real name was Procopio, and in his life he had been known by many other names. Nobody knows precisely how the affliction is transmitted, but it is known that when Lazaro was a little boy living in the Amazonas region he had had a pet armadillo that had sickened and died, and which could have been the carrier.

  He came from a caboclo family that lived in the forest in a hut with stilts. In the dry months they hunted jaguar and ocelot for the skins, and in the wet months they lived by taking the dolphins and hunting the parakeets for their feathers. Some people said that Lazaro became the way he did because there is a curse upon those who kill dolphins, and other people said that it was because the jaguar god became angry. It is true that most people avoided Lazaro’s family, because the dolphins are capable of becoming human and impregnating girls at fiestas, and the female dolphins make love to a man with such exquisite twitches of the tail that many men have inadvertently drowned whilst overcome with ecstasy. When that happens, the dolphin swims around the body for hours, singing with sorrow, and then nudges it onto a sandbank so that it can be found and buried decently before it is eaten by the caimans. Quite often the dolphins save the lives of those who are drowning, and sometimes the dolphins make a mistake and try to save those who are not drowning at all, but are really diving for turtles. That is something that one just has to put up with from time to time, and it serves to prove how simpatico the animals are. The caboclos allow the dolphins to take fish from their nets, and when the dolphins become human and emerge from the river with their different-coloured eyes and their beautiful muscles, they make love with whomever they choose, because it is bad to refuse a lover who loves so tenderly. Dolphin children always return eventually to the water, and so there are perhaps entire districts where the dolphins are half human, which makes it doubly a crime to kill them. Another reason is that dolphins love each other so romantically, so playfully, so completely, that it is obvious that they are sent by God to teach us by their example to do the same.

  Such is the power of love in dolphins that a cream made of the genitals of a female bufeo, rubbed into one’s own, can make one perfectly irresistible to members of the opposite sex, and so this cream is eagerly sought not only by canoieras, the prostitutes who make love in canoes while being rowed up and down by their pimps, but also by those who are of a promiscuous disposition and those who need help in pursuit of an amour. Some people know how to counterfeit this cream, with its distinctively pungent aroma and oily texture, but there is also a secret trade in the genuine article. It is bought discreetly from those accursed people who flaunt the will of God and hunt it.

  Lazaro’s family hunted the dolphins and made a good living from them, but no one wanted to know them, and no one was surprised when Lazaro fell ill so slowly that at first nobody noticed it. Later on people were to mistake it for Leishmaniosis, the disfiguring disease caused by infected sandflies, but later still it became very obvious what it really was, and that was when he finally had to leave.

  It began with infectious lesions that were barely noticeable, and Lazaro noticed that by the end of the day his legs were swollen. By morning they would be all right again, and so he shrugged his shoulders and accepted it as a small cross that he would have to bear until it got better. His nose always felt stuffy, and sometimes it would discharge a bloody mucus. When he put a finger up a nostril to clear it, sometimes he would detach a crusty scab and would go and bury it with a muttered despacho against illness.

  Someone who lives naked in the forest and spends most of his time in the water is unlikely to get too hot, especially when in the shade of the great trees, but at the times when Lazaro was glistening with perspiration from hunting, his mother would notice that areas of his dark skin had grown coppery, especially upon his legs and his arms, and she believed that it was because the Indian side of him was emerging from living so much like one himself.

  Lazaro was already married to Raimunda, and had two little ones, when the nodules started to appear on his face. There came a time when she could not bear to touch his face or to kiss him, and would make love with him reluctantly only in the dark. His little ones, small as they were, would shy away from his caresses, and sometimes he would weep alone in the forest. He went to see the cascabele who dressed entirely in rattlesnake tails, and he went to see the paje who knew secretos, but nobody knew how to get rid of the excrescences on his once-handsome face.

  His ears grew thick and lumpy, and the skin of his face grew into dense folds, so that people began to refer to him as ‘the elephant’. His legs swelled up and made the name more appropriate. They said that if one gave him an animal name he would sooner or later start to look like that animal, and so they called him other names out of a spirit of malicious experimentation. They called him ‘the Lion’, and his nose swelled and broadened. His eyelashes and eyebrows thinned and disappeared. At the point when his skin became dry and scaly, they called him ‘the Fish’, and one morning he woke up and found that Raimunda had left him and taken the children. Unable to bear his sorrow, he took a canoe and rowed upstream towards the mountains, where a man could die at an altitude closer to God and with a greater sense of peace.

  33 The Mausoleum

  IN IPASUEÑO DIONISIO’S friends had noticed that he had disappeared. He had not bothered to inform anyone of his plans, and they had immediately come to the conclusion that he had been assassinated at last. Some of them called in on his house, but neither Jerez nor Juanito knew where he was, and neither did anyone see his unmistakeable car about the town. The idea that he had driven away in it on holiday seemed preposterous because no one believed that it was capable of going long distances on roads that were a problem even for tractors. His friends took to wearing black armbands and spreading the rumour that he was dead, until the whole town knew about it and El Jerarca found attributed to him the very deed which he had been unable to perform. Jerez had the idea of auctioning off all of Dionisio’s possessions to the souvenir-collecting public, but Juanito shamed him out of it, saying that nothing should be touched without the permission of the relatives. Ramon privately believed that Dionisio was perfectly all right, but took the view that rumours of his death would help a great deal in the turning of local public opinion against the coca gangs. Señor Moreno, who knew perfectly well where Dionisio and his daughter were, was on a trip to buy Kalashnikovs from an army officer who had obtained them from a coca capo in exchange for explosives with which he intended to blow up the offices of La Prensa. The coca capo had obtained them from The People’s Liberation Force as part of a deal where the soidisant communists provided guards for his supply routes in return for cash. The People’s Liberation Force had originally acquired the Kalashnikovs from Señor Moreno himself, who had bought them from the captain of a Panamanian cargo ship in Barranquilla, who had picked them up from an A
rabian arms dealer, who had bought them in from Angola and from the Afghanistani mujaheddin after they had seen long service in Vietnam. Señor Moreno stood to gain a great deal of money in repurchasing these well-worn and itinerant weapons, and he did not discover anything about his daughter’s boyfriend’s death until it had already become obvious that he was not dead.

  Dionisio’s head of department was a lady of melodramatic disposition, and she took premature action in notifying La Prensa of his death in suspicious circumstances, and providing the newspaper with an emotional tribute in the form of an obituary. The only people who did not believe that he was dead were the women of the camps, who said that he came to them in dreams claiming to be still alive and offering them encouragement. Not one of them had felt any sensation of desolation or loss attendant upon his disappearance, and so they turned out to be the only ones who were right about him, which was because they were the only ones who had not been rational about the whole affair. When Dionisio eventually returned to Ipasueño he found that his job had been re-advertised, the chair of Secular Philosophy had been named after him in perpetuity, and a citizen’s subscription fund had been set up for the erection of a statue of commemoration in the plaza, and, should his body ever turn up, for the construction of a rococo mausoleum in execrable taste. Both of these El Jerarca planned to blow up, until he heard from his people in Valledupar that Dionisio was alive and well, and began to work on another idea that was suggested to him by Señor Moreno himself, who had decided that the only way to save Anica’s life was to separate her from her lover.