Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  Being what she was, Leticia received her communications. In the candomble she was the child of the Orisha Oshun, goddess of everything that makes life pleasant, who is also the saint Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre. For this reason Leticia kept her money in the dried shell of a pumpkin, and she wore one red bead to every five yellow beads in her necklace in order to commemorate the love affair of Oshun with Chango. She rubbed her belly with honey and she washed herself in the river at least once every day.

  It happened one day that as Leticia was walking to the river to fetch water for her mother, Oshun appeared to her in her disguise as a Catholic Saint, and, shimmering somewhat like a mirage, informed her that she should go to Ipasueño and do what she subsequently did. Oshun told her that in token of her sincerity she was giving her a special gift that no one must ever be allowed to see. Puzzled because Oshun had handed nothing over, Leticia went home with the water, and found in her hammock a bracelet made of five strands of burnished copper. She hid it on a string above her breast, and its presence there, along with the green stain that it made upon her honey-coloured skin, served as a perpetual reminder of her mission.

  It was on the day before she planned to depart that her father returned home drunk. He had been absent for two days, sleeping at the finca at night, his dreams boiling over with the bitterness of the unavailability of his daughter. Finally he had decided to go home and confess to her upon his knees, begging her understanding and her forgiveness, in the hope that confession would cleanse his soul.

  But it did not work out like that. When he came into her room she was sleeping in her hammock, looking in the semi-darkness like a sleeping angel. Señor Aragon was overcome with emotion, and tears rolled down his cheeks as he stroked her body through the thinness of her shift. At first this was no more than paternal, but it could not remain so. The thought came to him that he might take her in her sleep, that she might dream it. Gently he attempted to raise her garment, to unlace it at the throat, but the drink made his fingers clumsy, and as he leaned over her his shadow fell across her face.

  ‘I am awake, Papa,’ she said. Desperate, he lost control of himself, thinking that now that he had been caught there was nothing to lose by taking as much as he could before the world finally caved in on him and closed him up forever.

  He threw himself upon her, clawing at her body, attempting to kiss her lips as he had so often dreamed. But the hammock swayed, and under their combined weight the old fabric split. He had her cornered and was ripping off her shift when Señora Aragon came in and said with soft reproach, ‘Alberto.’

  The next morning Leticia left a note that said, ‘I am going to give away my virginity, suffer much, and bear a child for Oshun,’ and after she had gone they discovered the body of Alberto Aragon, who had gone to the river at the place where Leticia used to fetch the water for her mother and sliced his own throat.

  40 Foreboding

  ANICA’S MENSTRUATION BEGAN to ease off at the same time as the rain. Equally relieved, she and Dionisio began to go out a little during the respite of periods. The streets ran with brown water which carried with it the usual bizarre fluvial moraine of cat corpses, wardrobes, confused peccaries, and bright blue shirts. At first the air was so freshly washed that the lungs hurt to breathe matter so clean, but then the sun sank its claws into the water and heaved it up and scattered it as steam, so that all cold surfaces were coated with condensation, and elaborate fungi sprouted insolently from every crevice. The hypodermic mosquitoes were replaced by an anaesthetic humidity which caused the steam to seep out of the pores of the skin at the slightest movement, and the only recourse was to immerse oneself in the sea and conduct as normal a life as possible up to one’s neck in water.

  Anica and Dionisio hired a motorcycle, leaving as surety a gold ring that had originally been given by the King of Portugal to the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura in 1530 in gratitude for his mercenary services, and which had been passed down the Sosa family ever since. They thought of going into the great Spanish castle which had been built by African slaves who, upon release, had become the parents of the Nation, but it seemed too huge, too monolithic, and they both were depressed by what must have happened within its walls over the centuries. So they drove on through the dust, speeding past those tinselly little shrines erected every few metres to mark the spots of fatal accidents, in each of which was a daguerreotype of the deceased and some wilting flowers. They flew past old campesino women with dejected mules laden with unidentifiable vegetation and persecuted by flies, past whitewashed barracas with their unsociable cats and incurious children, past Satan-eyed goats and trees laden with dusty grenadillos.

  Anica wanted to stop every half-kilometre in order to take photographs, because she had noticed that the sea was shifting from one of her favourite shades of turquoise to another. In these photographs Dionisio posed, in one flexing his biceps, in another crossing his eyes, or standing with a banana in his shorts, a leering grimace on his face, and a pineapple on his head. In later years he would look at these photographs with the incredulous feeling of having survived an age of innocence that was as distant as the Wars of Independence and as impossible to recreate. It was a feeling that was always accompanied by an empty yearning, the feeling of ‘saudade’ that he had always tried to capture in his music.

  Anica took him many times around Nueva Sevilla town, looking for those Indian designs that were easier to find here than they were in the pueblos of the Indians themselves. He bought her some beads because she would not allow him to buy anything expensive; she felt guilty enough as it was, and she did not buy him a present in return because it would have been a farewell present.

  Coming out of a tienda they witnessed the progress of a mummified saint through the town, but failed to discover which one it was, owing to the hysterical fervour of those trying to touch its blackened and insanitary-looking feet in order to gain the benefits of one of its infrequent and often humorous miracles, such as that when it had reportedly failed to cure the loss of a leper’s hands but had caused him to wake up one morning amongst the garbage where he had been sleeping, to find that there was on his chest a brand-new pair of antique leather gloves. This gruesome cadaver with its demented snarl and yellow teeth, its skin like a dead cow’s, and its gingery whisps of hair, was incongruously decked with fresh white carnations flown in every morning from the capital at the expense of the religious orders of its devotees, who bought them from the same company that later gained notoriety by shooting its workers who went on strike rather than continue to die of diseases caused by illegal pesticides imported by unprincipled West German corporations. It is unknown whether or not the saint ever cured any of these workers or ever brought any of them back from the dead, but on this occasion its most resplendent miracle was to cause a traffic-jam unprocedented in N. Sevilla, and to cause Dionisio to catch sight of a little girl with flowers in her hair. He resolved that one day soon he was going to ask Anica to marry him so that they could have little daughters just like that.

  They drove endlessly on their motorcycle; it was an ideal way to keep cool in that temperature which made every image waver and caused mirages of N. Sevilla castle to appear in cattle fields. It was ideal for Anica to lay her head on Dionisio’s shoulder and kiss his neck, to wind her arms around his waist and memorise his scent and the contours of the muscles of his abdomen. It was ideal for Dionisio to see either side of him her long brown legs, smooth and irresistible, and to take his hands off the grips and stroke them. When he looked behind him he would see her hair whipping in the slipstream, her green shirt knotted carelessly beneath her breasts, her disproportionate earring, her green and white pinstripe shorts. He could see that her eyes were tight closed as if in reverie, and he felt the joy and terror of one whose hopes unfold like a flower as delicate and as easily crushed as white convolvulus.

  Late one evening, back at their apartment, they took photographs of each other smiling on the balcony, and afterwards he stood in the
doorway and watched her as she lay across the bed. For a few moments their eyes met, and they had the bewildering and disconcerting impression that each of them was wondering who precisely the other one was. It was as though they were strangers appraising each other for a position. She was feeling contemptible, and he was thinking that she was so innocent that without doubt she would be loyal unto death, and was wondering how badly one would have to treat her before she would pack her bags and leave. Suddenly he said, ‘I feel very miserable.’

  Astonished, and frightened that he might know something, she sat up and said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I do not want to go back to that syphilitic job in that syphilitic town, and I am afraid that when you go up to the capital you will leave me.’ He turned his back to her and leaned against the doorpost so that she would not see that his eyes were watering.

  She looked at her feet for a moment, full of the fear that because he was telepathic with animals he might also be able to read her mind, and might know that which she did not even want to admit to herself that she knew also. She was as frightened of him as she was of the threats of the brigands, because she had seen his Old Testament anger and knew that it was more deadly than bullets. She despised herself for feigning innocence. ‘Why do you think that I might leave you, querido?’

  He put his hands in his pockets, shivered, and hunched his chin down on his chest. Two of his tears ran surreptitiously and precognitively down his cheeks. ‘Because I feel so miserable.’

  41 The Firedance (3)

  WHEN LAZARO WAS defeated by the mighty cataracts and waterfalls of the upper courses he abandoned his canoe and continued by foot. He was in urgent need of a machete in the exuberant growth of the forest, but his hands had turned to claws and the bones in the ends of his fingers had been absorbed back into his body, leaving only fat stumps with the vestiges of nails; he could not have used one. He stumbled and flailed amongst the spikes and lances of the foliage, both blessed and cursed by the anaesthesia of his extremities. He felt none of the stings of the sandflies and the fire-ants, and none of the stabs of the thorns as he travelled always in the direction of the setting sun, which sometimes he could not see through the foliage, and of the cool peaks of the mountains, which occasionally he glimpsed through the onset of his blindness.

  The lacerations in his naked feet grew into ulcers weeping with pus and stinking slime whose putrefaction he could not smell, and the bones in the ends of them disappeared. The other bones shrank into spindles and needles and broke repeatedly, unbeknownst to him, and the deformities made it ever harder to lurch onward. When he crossed the patches of naked sunlight the flesh of his hands and feet burst into blisters which he saw but did not feel, and in the evening before sunset he would extract the maggots with a stick held in his mouth or between the remainder of his hands.

  By the time that the air had thinned, the nights grown cold, and the luxuriance of the vegetation diminished, Lazaro was already dying. He could hardly breathe on account of the ulcers narrowing his throat, and his breath came in hoarse coughs and strangled whistles. Likewise when he spoke to himself in his prayers and his remembered endearments to Raimunda and his little ones, his voice was a croak like a vulture, and he lost the ability to articulate because papules had appeared upon his lips, nodules had appeared upon his tongue and uvula, and his palate was perforated where an ulcer had rotted its way through. As he staggered and wheeled in the open spaces of the foothills, blinded by the inescapable light and choked by the coolness of the air, the madness of the nearly dead came upon him, and he sang to himself by a stream in a long dream of beauty as he starved and rotted.

  He was back in the forest, and it was the first time that he set eyes upon Raimunda. She was emerging from the water with her fifteen-year-old’s breasts round and firm and letting fall the droplets from the dark nipples that had contracted in the coldness. She was smiling because she was holding in her hand a tambaqui fish which she had caught by staying perfectly still beneath the surface, and grabbing it as it went by. From his canoe he saw her, and he exclaimed, ‘Hola, muchacha, are you giving that one to me?’

  ‘When the moon eats the sun I will give it to you,’ she said, laughing. He saw that her eyes were darkest brown, and that around her neck she wore a necklace of pierced shells. When she laughed her teeth were very white behind her lips, and she licked the water from them in a manner which struck him as mischievous.

  She saw that he was strong and handsome and had a canoe full of pirarucu and characin, and she judged him to be a fine fishing man. ‘Are you giving that one to me?’ she asked, pointing to the largest fish.

  ‘Of course I give it to you,’ he replied, ‘in return for your kiss.’

  Lazaro remembered the first time that he and Raimunda had exchanged the gift of their bodies, on a praia that was flashing with kingfishers. He recalled how they had both gasped with surprise, and how it was that they had fitted so perfectly together in every slow movement. They had slept there afterwards in the dappled light, and then splashed each other in the water until it was nearly night and they realised that they had caught no fish and were surrounded by hummingbirds.

  He pictured his delight when little Teresa was born, a perfect miracle of a child who had hardly ever cried and who had learned to swim before she was able to hold herself upright. Sometimes Teresita would mix him up with her mother and attempt to suckle him, so that he would have to stick his finger in her mouth to pacify her.

  Lazaro remembered the time when his tiny son had come across a pipa toad and pointed at it as if to say without words ‘Papa, why is it so flat?’, because even at so young an age, Alfonsito knew that toads were supposed to be big and fat. He had explained to his son that this was a toad as thin as a reed, and ‘sapo’ was the first word that Alfonsito had ever attempted to say.

  ‘I am uglier than a toad,’ thought Lazaro, and in his sleep he wept. ‘I am no longer even a man,’ he said, ‘because I have grown the breasts of a woman and my cojones have shrivelled away. All I have is the hair upon my head to show that I am human. Raimunda, I was as beautiful as you, and once you loved me.’ And once more he was with Raimunda making love in the hut on stilts that they had built together and bound to the trees with lianas, and it was raining outside, and the howler monkeys were shrieking, and far off the caimans’ eyes were glowing red in the dark with the fire that they had stolen from the gods, and the dolphins were singing to each other as the waters rose.

  42 Sacrifice

  DIONISIO SANK A great deal of energy into finding solitary places along the coast. He was adept and energetic in scrambling up and down the scree of slopes, as all people are who have grown up in the sierra and have spent their childhood living in fantasy outdoors. He managed to find two routes down a cliff to a small bay that they had visited originally in a boat.

  At the top of the cliff there was an ancient well in the middle of what once must have been a beautiful formal garden, but which was now a neglected wilderness, and heaped up on one side of the wall was a fragile pile of weathered donkey jaw-bones. He scrutinised them with the feeling that they were sinister, and then, months later, when he had learnt about these things from Pedro, he recalled them and realised that they were the remnants of the ceremonies of santeria.

  It was a bay of glistening white pebbles that had travelled for centuries from some other place under the placid migrations of longshore drift. There was a cave there that ran four metres under the cliff, and whose mouth was partially concealed by two large rocks with the water lapping at their base. Anica at first complained bitterly about having to climb down the cliff with its precipitous and unnerving face, which was made all the worse by Dionisio’s ease in descending it, and the persiflage with which he teased her about her tentative progress. But once they were down she was delighted by the place and by its cave, which was like the womb of Pachamama herself.

  They took off all their clothes because it was a place where there could be no sensation more free, mo
re delightful, more sensual, than to swim in nakedness in warm water and then to allow the sun to dry away the water upon the skin. It stirred in them a kind of incredulous, wild bliss.

  Once, when he emerged from the sea like Poseidon hung with seaweed and enchanted by the songs of mermaids, gripping the pebbles with his toes for balance, he saw Anica splayed obliviously in her nakedness. Her soft gingery hair refracted the light, her breasts were vulnerably pale, and her lips were moving in her sleep because she was dreaming of all the things that she would never be able to say to him.

  Moved by awe he lay down beside her to let the sun evaporate his skin of brine, and as the heat seeped into him and permeated him he felt it simultaneously arouse him. Leaning up on his elbow he bent over her face and kissed her, his hands wandering the gentle slopes and pastures of her body. She lifted a hand in her sleep and gripped his arm tightly, and then they both were shaken with a terrible desire. With one mind, she still half asleep, they picked up their mats and went into the womb of Pachamama.

  Gently, intently, they savoured every slip and tug of their engaged flesh until suddenly she opened her eyes and knew that she was bearing his child. She was filled both with exhilaration and grief, the one because now she would always carry a part of him with her, and the other because she knew that now she could not linger over parting.

  They lay together in silence in a tight embrace until suddenly Anica realised that they were not alone. Out in the bay there was a rowing-boat laden with lobster-pots, and, just a few yards out, there was a ridiculous-looking little man as bald as a colonial banister standing up to his neck in water watching them.

  Dionisio stood up and walked out naked as he was. He waved at the scopophile and shouted, ‘Hola, hombre. How does it feel to have seen the greatest of the eight wonders of the world?’ Whereupon the bald voyeur with comical panic in his face turned and swam ashamedly back to his boat, and Dionisio turned back to Anica and said, ‘I feel sorry for anybody who did not see us just then. He was the only lucky man.’