Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  Hours later, having lost litres in perspiration, having been squashed and battered by people carrying sacks of coconuts and sucking pigs, having got stuck behind God-knows-how-many-campesinos driving ceibu cattle across the road, having caught glimpses many times of the serene Caribbean, having looked at all the palms with their messianic fronds waving like semaphore, they arrived in Nueva Sevilla.

  They found easily a room in a little pension off the Calle Santa Marta, right out on the edge of town. It was cool and dark even though there was no fan and little ventilation. They established that there were bedbugs in the beds and cockroaches in the shared kitchen, and that the excusado was blocked and fetid. Dionisio went out and came back with chemical powders and a rubber plunger, while Anica threw open the balcony shutters and moved the two truckle beds together so that there was a greater chance of leaving Dionisio with his child in her womb. As she unpacked their belongings and listened to the sea she started to feel some of her misery fade away, and she resolved that for this holiday, right up to the last day, they would be once again old friends and new lovers. When Dionisio had returned she put her arms around his neck and said, ‘Querido, let us go down to the sea.’

  They put on their swimming things under their clothes and went down to the sea. The shore was covered in Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans, empty Marlboro and Kent packets, and all the eternally indestructible plastic flotsam of United States economic expansion. Dionisio held up a Coca-Cola can and said, ‘It would not be so bad if they still called it Inca-Cola.’

  ‘Is it safe to swim here?’ asked Anica. ‘Where do they discharge the sewage?’

  ‘I think it all goes along the coast the other way. But they say that the sharks eat one person a year, especially people in yellow swimsuits. Fortunately yours is green and mine is blue.’

  ‘Have they eaten this year’s victim yet?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘O bueno.’

  It was a deliciously hot and cloudless day that was only bearable in the water; Anica felt sure that at last she would become tanned enough to match the rest of the nation’s inhabitants. She went in and out of the water, sunbathing until she got too hot, and then returning to the sea. He watched her swimming breaststroke in small jerky circles and felt his love for her flood back into his solar plexus. She said, ‘You are not permitted to horse about, because I do not want to lose my contact lenses. If I lose them I will kick out your teeth.’

  A few metres out they stood enclosed in each other’s embrace, kissing saltily as the water lapped about their chins. She put her hand down to feel him growing hard, and he slipped his down to feel her growing wet and turgid. She looked at him with her eyes shining and said, ‘You are an evil old bastardo.’

  Back in the pension Anica said, ‘I have a nice surprise for you. You do not have to use rubbers anymore. I have gone on the pill.’

  Dionisio was astounded. Such chemical technology was almost unavailable, and he knew no one who used it. ‘This is a joke?’ he asked.

  ‘No querido, I got them from my father’s doctor. He gets them from West Germany for his wealthy clients.’

  He remembered something he had read in a magazine. ‘But you have to take it for a month before it is effective.’

  ‘I know. I have been taking it for a month,’ she lied, avoiding his infallible intuitive lie-detection by pretending to arrange the pillows.

  They fell hungrily into each other’s embrace and made love on her side of the bed. They had fallen out of practice and out of rhythm, and he came too soon on account of the unfamiliar exquisiteness of contact with real flesh. But all the same, as if by sorcery, they found that they were lovers again, laughing and kissing in the darkness, uttering idiotic endearments, lying entwined with the sensation of homecoming.

  37 The Firedance (2)

  LAZARO PASSED IN his canoe through a shanty town where the destitute migrant workers, the dispossessed, the greedy opportunists, and the romantic optimists were mining for gold. In this tropical inferno there were no trees.

  Lazaro missed the trees. He walked with his hideousness in a landscape made hideous by excavation and denudation. In the great pits men were working like termites, carrying their pails of mud up the sliding, glistening faces of these arbitrary holes in the earth. They were burrowing amid the heaps of spoil, slaving by the river, poisoning both it and themselves with the mercury of the separation process.

  Downstream, the Indians were dying from eating fish poisoned with the metal, and the fish themselves were dying of it also. The once black waters had turned light brown, and the rains were washing the deforested banks into the riverbed. Nowadays the caboclos further downstream found that when the floods receded they were left not with virgin forest floor, but with an ocean of sucking clay that set hard and then cracked.

  In the town at night the skeletal and rachitic workforce took their recreation amongst the corrugated iron and the middens. Indian girls with drooping breasts and malnourished stomachs, with dead eyes and the assurance of an early grave, gave away their favours to drunks in return for home-made rum and a few centavos. As they died of syphilis and influenza their little babies were abandoned by the river to what wild animals were left, and new girls arrived who had been rounded up by armed canoes or bribed with promises of beads and powerful husbands wearing cloaks made out of the pelts of pure black jaguars. After many rapes and beatings the girls would learn that they could suffer the present and forget the past with a bottle to their lips and a man with glassy eyes and a tubercular cough heaving between their thighs.

  At night the place would reverberate with the gunshots of those who murdered in order to take the few flecks of gold gleaned by a bandeirante in his months of relentless toil. By day the buyers with their armed bodyguards would acquire the gold at rock-bottom prices, and those who refused such deals disappeared without mystery and were instantly forgotten, except perhaps by their trueloves at home, who waited for them to return rich, having known all along that they had in reality lost their loves forever.

  The National Army, who had come in the first place to open up the area and build the ‘New Frontier’ in the name of the Fatherland and Economic Progress, watched in horror as the public disorder grew beyond their power to police it. Officers suffering from jiggers and maggots in their skin would observe helplessly as their men succumbed to unnameable fevers and fits of heat-induced dementia; they would send pathetic pleas for medical supplies and reinforcements, only to receive despatches encouraging them to ‘keep up the good work’. Some would send reports back that all was peaceful and that there was no further role for them, in the hope that their unit would be recalled. Many soldiers deserted and were lost to the forest, some joined the gold fever; most of them found a way to die.

  Lazaro joined the army of beggars hoping to live off the crumbs that fell from the tables of illusory wealth. Don Ignacio the cura took pity on his ugliness and gave him a monk’s cowl that had been his own before he had left the monastery to take up this mission to the lost children of the slimepits and the auriferous mud. Don Ignacio lost his life to a knife in the back and a robber’s desire for his bone crucifix, but Lazaro was to wear the cowl for the rest of his life.

  The nerves in his legs and arms began to harden, and he lost some of the control in them. They became as hard as wood. His septum collapsed, and in the darkness of his cowl his nose disappeared and his upper teeth loosened and were lost. Lazaro lost the ability to close his eyes properly, and in the shattering sunlight he sought out dark corners, where his begging became a litany of misery addressed to no one because it was in reality a reproach addressed to God.

  In this town of misfortunes which would have astounded the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch, Lazaro took advantage of his disease and charged fifty centavos in the taverns to those who wished to stub out their cigarettes upon his extremities. They stubbed them out even in the necrotic and suppurating ulcers, because it made an amusing fizzing noise and the cigarette-end would abso
rb the pus and blood by capillary action. For five pesos Lazaro would then eat the cigarette-ends amid the howls of mirth and the shouts of encouragement. He would have smiled himself, but the progress of the disease into his cranial nerves had given him the palsy. For five pesos also, Lazaro would allow the bold frontiersmen to cut away the granular nodules that grew upon his hands and feet, and in this way he punished himself for his misfortune and would have earned a living from it too, did not his condition make it impossible for him to resist the attacks of nocturnal robbers and the gangs of mischief-makers.

  One day, a month before the rains, Lazaro recollected his desire to die in the sierra, and at night he stole a canoe and paddled upstream to where the waters were black, and the fish unpoisoned. The last thing he heard from the town as he left it was the characteristic keening of an Indian woman.

  38 Rain

  ANICA WAS ATTEMPTING to put the future aside and live in the present as she always had in the past. But impending disaster was breathing at her back and her moods swung between irrational optimism and disconsolate pessimism. She sometimes snapped at Dionisio, and she sometimes lost her sense of humour. He once pulled off her shorts in the sea, and she was furious with him when normally she would have laughed. She became annoyed when he stroked her thighs as they walked along, because it seemed to her to show a disrespect for her private grief, whereas before it used to send shivers up to her groin. He offended her by refusing to go into a dance-hall on the grounds that the music was so bad that it was a sacrilege against St Cecilia and Euterpe and Terpsichore, when she just wanted to go in and lose her unhappiness in dancing. She was offended by him when he got trouble with amoebas and had stomach cramps and diarrhoea. He felt as though he had swallowed a kilo of shards of glass, and spent hours moaning on the excusado; she felt that his misery was pathetic by comparison with her own, and she offered no sympathy, but left him there and went off to walk in solitude amongst the bazaars and the street-hawkers, cursing him for a weakling, only to return later full of repentant concern in order to wipe the fever from his face and ask him if he was all right.

  Even so, the couple developed a routine for their vacation. They would get up late, when it was too hot to lie together any more. They would eat a breakfast of eggs and bread and strong coffee. They would go to the sea to swim and sleep, they would eat arepas and drink freezing beer at midday, and then take siesta back on the seashore amid the shade of the palms. When the sun began its precipitate descent to the horizon they would walk home through the strafing of the mosquitoes to take a shower before going into town for a meal. They tried every restaurant one after the other, and Dionisio said, ‘This country runs on sancocho more than it runs on petroleum.’ They would drink iced wine, and then they would go home to make love late into the night. He reminded Anica of her stepmother’s warning of what could befall innocent virgins when alone with a man in a strange place, saying, ‘She thinks you will come back pregnant.’ Anica smiled secretly, and fervently wished.

  The old couple in the room nextdoor moved out and were replaced by two plump and Rubensian nymphs whose life was a permanent party for all manner of local Romeos. There was much shouting, ribald laughter, slamming of doors, scuffling, rattling of bedheads against walls, and orgasmic wailing, so that one day at four o’clock in the morning Dionisio could not stand it any more and he burst in on them in mid-orgy.

  The two naked girls and the four naked men sprawled amid a chaos of bottles and bedclothes stopped dead in mid-frolic and all four men lost their erections simultaneously. They were terrified of this huge man with the wild eyes and disarrayed hair who shouted at them with Hephaestan fury and overturned the beds on top of them, demanding an instant cessation to their interminable racket every night. The next day when they saw Dionisio they did not believe it was the same man because he seemed half the size of the man who had terrorised them, but they conducted their bacchanalia thenceforth in frightened whispers that somehow augmented the pleasure because it was like the teenage thrill of making love with a handkerchief in one’s mouth in order to remain inaudible to one’s parents.

  Anica was deeply dismayed by the arrival of her period because it demonstrated the failure of her intentions to come to fruition, and she became fractious until the time of her fertility recurred.

  During this time when Anica was distressed by the normally welcome appearance of her menses and Dionisio was involved in acute self-questioning as to what he could have done to make Anica’s mood so changeable, it began to rain. It rained for three days, imprisoning them in their room. They sat on the balcony watching the water rise in the street like a river, and listening to the enervating splash of the incessant torrent of water that rose up again as steam only to fall down again as rain. Dionisio read to Anica the story of the ‘Monologo de Isabel Viendo Llover en Macondo’, and then she read romantic novelettes whilst he struggled with the inscrutable Portuguese of Viva o Povo Brasileiro. On the second day of reading this masterpiece the frustration of the rain and the power-cuts overwhelmed him quite suddenly and he hurled the book at the wall and started shouting, ‘Why the fuck cannot Ribeiro write in goddam Spanish? Why do I have to read epics in some godforsaken bastardised language like this? Why do not the fucking Brazilians speak the same as the rest of us?’ Anica looked up from her book in which the tall director had just fallen in love with an actress with a hidden past, and held out her hand to him.

  When it rains like this, all one can do is read books or make love. But such drastic limitation of choice makes the soul rebel against doing either, and one has to rediscover the meaning of love to make it bearable.

  ‘I am bleeding,’ she said, ‘but come here, mi amor.’ He took her hand and she drew him down, making penance with her actions for the dreadful thing that she would have to do one day soon. She petted him until it was physically painful for him to lie alongside her beautiful, smooth young body. He smiled and kissed her softly. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘who gives a shit if it is your period? Go and take that cotton cigar out.’

  Anica made love to him with her eyes tightly closed because she was analysing and memorising every smallest sensation against her future without him.

  39 Leticia Aragon (2)

  IN THE PUEBLO of San Martin the young men formed a club. It was in the nature of a Leticia Aragon Appreciation Society, except that they called it El Club del Dolor. It met informally up to two times a week in their respective homes, and no meeting was declared closed until everyone was too drunk or too lachrymose to continue.

  The club listened sympathetically as each member expounded the depth of his passion and the extremity of his despair. They applauded each other’s ballads and boleros, discussed sightings and words exchanged, laid wagers upon who would receive the first kiss, the first caress, the first consummation. On this latter subject there was heated debate over whether it was possible to sleep with Leticia and not die of ecstasy, and the more romantic amongst them declared that to sleep with her would in any case be a profanation. This suggestion was always shouted down and ridiculed, but there was not one of them who did not know in his heart that it was perfectly true; Leticia was just not one of those women that one might seriously aspire to bed.

  While the young men burned with desire, formed groups for the purpose of performing serenades and retretas, wrote poems on the lids of cigarette packets and burned her name on trees with magnifying glasses, Señor Aragon burnt himself out with his self-imposed restraint.

  He had married young, and was only thirty years old when his daughter was fourteen. He was a man in his physical prime, alert and vigorous, handsome and strong, with a perfect black moustache, stubble by noon, and curly black hair that he was only just beginning to lose. He was also a man of the strictest honour who never gave more to whores than he gave to his wife, and who never reached a natural understanding of his demented passion for his exquisite daughter.

  He became morose and quick-tempered, nearly struck his wife once when she argued with him,
and, completely contrary to the tenor of his nature, he took to disappearing for days at a time and coming back drunk and reeking of vomit.

  Leticia in the meantime had become a creature even more detached. Sometimes in the house she reverted to her infantile habit of nakedness, and on those occasions her father would gaze upon her hungrily at the very time that he was commanding her to dress herself and not to bring shame upon the house.

  She took to voracious reading, living in a world of novellas inhabited by tycoons and enraptured beauties, handsome politicians and ladies of dubious intentions. But she was not so detached that when people began to talk about this Dionisio Vivo, who was bound to get killed one day, she did not notice. She asked her mother about it, sensing in her very marrow that here was someone who was not from a novel who was a real tragic hero. Leticia confounded her family by placing a permanent order for La Prensa with the tienda, and read it avidly even though it was always two weeks late by the time it had travelled by aeroplane, truck, tractor and mule all the way from the capital to her own little pueblo.

  There was something mesmeric about the tone of the coca letters; she found compassion and anger, taut argument and breadth of vision, and discovered that there was a world outside where there really were atrocities, international politics, and power-hungry villains. She also discovered that in the world there were genuine Don Quijotes who stand up to anything regardless of the consequences and who attempt the impossible and the improbable without the slightest chance of success.

  Leticia became preoccupied with Dionisio Vivo. She would eagerly turn to the letters page of every edition that she received, and if there were not a letter from him she would throw it to the floor in anger, until she would pick it up again to read the news pages. Frequently she would sit perfectly still in the doorway, or outside amongst the platanos, contemplating the thought of Dionisio Vivo as if she were expecting a communication from him upon the airwaves of the ether.