Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  On the way home Anica felt a sudden desire for chocolate, a desire that she was to experience for all the months of her term. Dionisio stopped the motorcycle outside a tiny tienda with leaning brushwood walls and a sign outside it that proclaimed ironically ‘Harrods’. The chocolate was melted to sticky brown liquid inside its wrapper, and she hungrily licked if off the silver paper, which she then folded because she intended to put it in a tiroir de souvenirs that she would keep all her life and fill with memories of Dionisio.

  That evening at the restaurant Anica began to try to confide in him her deepest feelings, as if by doing so she could convince him of her philosophy, so that he would not suffer a materialist’s desolation in the face of tragedy. She told him that she believed that her mother was presiding over her life and guiding things so that everything would ultimately turn out right. She told him that there was a difference between fate and providence and destiny, and that providence could defeat fate and bring things to their assigned destiny. She paused to await his reaction, but he just wanted to talk about how funny it had been when they had caught the bald man watching them. Anica gave up and sat in silence, wanly thinking about what she would have to say when they got home, and wondering if she would have the strength to endure such time until fate might be overwhelmed by providence.

  Because she could not face the task immediately, Anica went out and sketched the bell-tower of a small church, wondering where God was and why He remained silent and impotent and neglectful of the joy of the world. Dionisio went out and found her by instinct and gave her figs to eat. When she had finished her sketch and received no indications of interest nor concern from the morphinomaniac deity, they walked together about the town, up and down the alleys, peering into derelict houses through boarded-up windows, looking at nests of huge hornets, taking a drink in a dirty little bar. They were imbibing for the last time the flavour of that dirty town with its capricious beauties and its inefficient commercialism.

  That night he came out of the shower to find her sitting pensively on their improvised double-bed with her head against the headboard. Matter-of-factly she said, ‘Querido, I am not happy.’

  He stopped with one leg halfway into his trousers. ‘I am sorry, what do you mean?’

  She bit her lip and began the impossible task of trying to do this business without lying. ‘I am just not very happy.’

  It dawned upon Dionisio exactly what she meant, because he had had presentiments as clear as mountain water which he had been unable to dismiss. ‘You mean, querida, that you are leaving me.’ He sat down beside her on the bed and smiled at her, seeing that her eyes were persecuted and troubled.

  ‘I see no alternative. What else can we do?’

  His heart lurched, and panic and horror began to insinuate their way into his soul. For a moment he was dumbfounded, and then he hung his head and said very quietly, ‘Please, what have I done wrong?’

  She put her hand on his neck and said, ‘You have done nothing. This is all to do with me.’

  Sick paralysis exploded, but in slow motion, out from his diaphragm. Neither of them could ever remember how long they sat there in silence, their minds refusing to focus upon thought, shorting wildly from point to point. Gradually Dionisio began to rock back and forth, clutching his forearm across his belly, recalling with dread and clarity how at times of such infernal grief his muscles would go into spasm, he would not be capable of breath, and he would lie doubled up on the floor choking and gasping, praying the indifferent God in whom he did not believe for a merciful death. A groan sprang from him that surprised him by seeming to have arrived from somewhere else, and at last hot tears began to flow through the fingers that he clutched to his face so tightly that Anica saw that the joints had turned white. She put her arm around him and he began to talk for a very long time. He told her every detail of his woeful history; how it was that everything that he had ever attempted had started out blessed with auspicious augury and had ended in catastrophe, about how he knew deep down that in every way he was a total failure, that all his bravado and machismo and intellectual superiority were a shameful fraud, about how he had discovered this once before and had tried to kill himself, about how he knew that one day this time would come and how there was nothing left any more and how he would never have anything because he could make even gold crumble to dust in his fingers.

  ‘You are not crying about me,’ she said softly, ‘you are crying about life.’

  He looked up at her through his tears and said, ‘As you see, Bugsita, I am consumed by self-pity.’ Feeling detached, because she had still not come to know the bitter sorrow of what she was being forced to do, she leaned forward and kissed him.

  ‘Judas,’ he said.

  ‘You were my lover,’ she said. ‘You were the best man of my life.’

  He looked down upon her with such freezing Olympian anger that she hung her head down and wept, choking, and she said, ‘Please, Dio’, I am innocent.’

  ‘Those who murder love are worse than the coca bastards,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘No, querido,’ she murmured. ‘They are about the same.’

  They remained in cold silence until abruptly they threw themselves upon each other with desperate passion, both consumed with that peculiar poignant lust that inevitably strikes on those occasions when one believes that this will be the very last time with that love, when the contact of flesh with flesh seems to engender an occult white heat. Believing that she was on the pill, Dionisio desperately hoped that nonetheless it would be ineffective, that fate would conspire with him to leave her pregnant, that that would force her to stay with him.

  43 The Firedance (4)

  LAZARO WAS ALREADY ringed by condor vultures when Pedro and Misael found him. They had been trading vegetables from the andenes of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, exchanging them for mountain sheep with the Acahuatecs in the villages of the sierra. They were returning with a train of mules and a young wild bull that they had lassoed amongst the rocks. The bull had fought fiercely, but Pedro had toppled it by getting a rope about its legs, and then he had whispered secretos in its ears until finally it understood that it was in careful hands and would enjoy a life of many spritely heifers in Cochadebajo de los Gatos.

  ‘Ay, and what is this?’ exclaimed Misael, when they happened upon what was apparently a dead monk by an arroyo. Pedro bent low and pulled back the cowl. He stepped back sharply and muttered a fierce prayer to Eshu to keep away with his malice and his dirty tricks.

  What the two men saw was a copious growth of white hair, beneath which was nothing that resembled a face. There were huge folds of thick skin, ears that were large and of no shape; where there would have been a nose there was a cavity flowing with blood and mucus, swarming with flies and writhing with larvae. The eyes, blocked open, had a film of whiteness about them, and the appearance of death. Most horrific of all, the face was hanging with lumps and growths, many of them rotting and suppurating, and in the gap that was once a mouth could be seen an encrusted tongue that seeped blood from its cracks and craters. The whole face was twitching and jerking in its palsy.

  Lazaro awoke from his dream of Raimunda and saw before him Pedro dressed in animal skins, an old man, but a man strong and lithe, with his musket in his hand. Moving his eyes he beheld Misael, another strong old man, with his campesino muscles and his machete in his belt. Lazaro believed that he had died and that standing before him were the choices given to him by the angels as to how he should look in the afterlife. He raised his claw and pointed to Pedro. ‘That one,’ he said.

  Misael turned to Pedro and said, ‘He speaks with the voice of a vulture.’

  ‘We should kill the poor wretch,’ replied Pedro, ‘there can be no life for him. It would be a great mercy.’

  Understanding that he was not dead, Lazaro stirred and pleaded, ‘Kill me.’

  Pedro took a charge from his pouch and rammed it down the barrel of his ancient weapon. He dropped a ball down, and then tamped in a wad.
He knelt down before the pitiful specimen and said to him, ‘I beg your permission for this, and your forgiveness, cabron, and may Yemaya take you to her arms and Babalu-Aye heal you in heaven.’

  Lazaro, unable these days to nod, inclined his head painfully forward to signify assent, and tears of happiness began to flow down his cheeks. Pedro raised the musket and placed the barrel against Lazaro’s forehead.

  But just then one of Pedro’s bitches came forward and sniffed at the crumpled man. She whined, and licked at the sores on his feet. Misael checked Pedro, saying, ‘Amigo, if a dog takes pity, how much more should we? Perhaps Aurelio knows how to cure this?’

  Pedro lowered the gun and pondered. He asked, ‘Can you walk?’ and Lazaro whispered, ‘No.’

  ‘Vale, then we will take you on a mule. We have a great babalawo, a great brujo who knows more than we, and we will take you to him. De acuerdo?’

  Lazaro, too weary to argue or even to long for death enough to insist upon it, inclined his head again, and the two men yoked a pair of mules and suspended a hammock between the animals to take the body. Before they lifted him onto it, Pedro and Misael picked out every parasite and maggot they could find on Lazaro, and they heated up water from the stream to wash him down. Misael took oil from a flask and rubbed it with a cloth all over the cracked scales and sores. He looked at the breasts, the hairless torso and the shrivelled male genitals, and asked, ‘Forgive me, friend, but are you man or woman?’

  ‘I was a man, but now I am nothing. I am a beast. I am an elephant and a lion, a fish and a vulture. I am a thing unknown to God.’

  ‘You will be a man again, cabron, with God’s help.’ Misael burned the cloth, and they dressed Lazaro once more in his cowl before lifting him onto the sling.

  In Cochadebajo de los Gatos, Aurelio thought that something was up, and he took ayahuasca in a bitter draught and his spirit became an eagle. Flying in the updraughts ever higher, his eye fell upon alcamarini birds, vizcachas, and cui, but he resisted the side of him that had become a raptor, and he flew on. He passed the place where the ancient mummies of the Indians were crouched in alcoves in the caves, he soared over the place where once Pachacamac had thought of building a palace, and then his eyes rested on the mule train, and he saw Pedro and Misael. The latter was riding upon a mule, and Pedro was walking as he always did. He saw the burden of the mules and inspected the body of Lazaro, so that when the mule train arrived at the city he would be ready to do whatever had to be done. He flew on out over the forest and circled above his other home, the place where he lived with Carmen his wife, whose real name was Matarau, and the place where his daughter Parlanchina was buried. He spied out with his eagle’s vision all the places where the right herbs and barks could be found, and then returned to Cochadebajo de los Gatos. He set out at a steady pace on foot, and arrived home in the forest faster even than a marguey could have run it without stopping. He would be back in the city, prepared and ready, when the recua arrived.

  Pedro knew the art of covering immense distances on foot in a short time, but without hurrying, but Misael did not know it, and there were other things to consider. Lazaro and the animals would need time to adapt to the ever-increasing altitude.

  As they climbed, passing through the pajonales and the quebradas, the punas and the lloclias, they were forced to stop frequently because it became more and more hard for Lazaro to breathe. His gasps came more raspingly and with greater difficulty, and Pedro saw that he was likely to suffocate from the combination of the restricted passage of his windpipe and the rarefied air. One night he gave him so many copas of chicha to drink that he fell unconscious.

  Pedro heated up his knife over the fire and walked over to where Lazaro lay in a stupor. He pulled aside the cowl and felt with his fingers for a good place to cut. He pressed the point of the knife into Lazaro’s neck, and the stench of charred flesh immediately filled the air. Then, holding the wound open with two fingers, Pedro forced in a wide but short tube of cane. From then on Lazaro breathed more easily and the ulcers in his throat even began to heal a little. Misael had not been able to bear to watch the operation, and he spent that time feeding ichu grass to the mules, preparing beds in the dirty little choza that the Indians allowed them to use for the night, and cooking up cancha to eat.

  They spent three days amongst the blue lupinus below the snowline to accustom Lazaro to the worst altitudes, feeding him on a tuber that prevents snowblindness, making him chew wads of coca, and swallow lumps of chancaca to keep up his strength. But despite that, Lazaro suffered from the soroche badly enough for his eyes to bulge and his brains to throb before they passed through the portachuelos and began the descent into the city of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. By the time that they had entered it, some of Lazaro’s worst lesions had already begun to heal over on account of the first attempts at care that he had ever received in his life.

  44 University

  OPPRESSED BY THE ephemerality of joy, Anica sat beside him on the bus, watching the landscape slip away much as a drowning man is reputed to see his life pass before his eyes. Beside her sat a man whom she had known in the most intimate detail, who had become one half of her body and soul. He had been a bubbling stream in which she had bathed by moonlight, a nocturnal bird singing in the empty spaces of the darkness, an exquisite foil to everything that she had said and done and thought of doing. But now, after all these months, she could feel him becoming alien to her. He was weeping unashamedly in public, and with every tear he was turning into jagged stone.

  At the airport with its heat and humidity of the inside of a kettle he refused to sit with her. On the aeroplane, leaping in the windstream like a great pelagic fish carried upon the circular currents of the oceans, he ignored her. At Valledupar he threw himself into the arms of Mama Julia and then into the arms of La Prima Primavera. Mama Julia followed him into the garden, and in the peripateticon she told him, ‘Maybe you should have cherished her more.’

  He shouted at her, ‘Even if I were Jesus Christ himself, you still would think I could do nothing right,’ and then he called the dog and took it on the fastest and most exhausting walk it had ever had. When he returned he collared Anica and told her, ‘Go and tell my mother that I cherished you,’ and Mama Julia told him that she had tried to talk to Anica. With an expression of puzzlement she told him, ‘She simply informed me that this is what she always does.’

  ‘What?’

  Mama Julia paused and furrowed her brow, ‘I told her that one cannot go through life hurting people as and when one feels like it.’ She shrugged, ‘I think that the girl must have a little bit missing.’

  ‘And that is all that she said?’

  ‘I kept asking her, but she could not think of a reason. Dionisio, I cannot understand her. I thought that she was so good.’ Mama Julia was perplexed. She hugged her son. ‘I believe that you would be better off with someone else.’

  ‘For the love of God, I want no one else, I have had enough of someone else.’

  On the two-day drive back to Ipasueño Anica was subjected to the full weight of his choler; it was a vituperative stream of accusations, reproaches, criticisms, and vindictive observations. She sat stiffly and took it all in, thinking that if this carried on she would genuinely cease to love him, but saying nothing.

  They saw each other several times over the next few days; he developed an intuition about when she was coming up the hill of the Calle de la Constitucion, and he would rush out to catch her before she went into her father’s house. Twice she agreed to come in for a tinto, and twice they finished in bed making love with all the passion of reunion. Twice she agreed that no, the relationship is not finished, and twice she came around the next day to say that it was. He told her that every time that they were reconciled she wrecked it again deliberately, and she looked at him and said, ‘Perhaps you do not understand that I cannot want these reconciliations to succeed. Please, I do not have to listen to all of your insults.’ And he grasped her shirt by the collar and held
her against the wall and snarled into her face, ‘Oh, you do,’ and then they were in bed again in the dark and he said, ‘Do you want me to fetch you a knife so that you can kill me more quickly and finish your work?’ And she sat up suddenly because the thought occurred to her that really whatever she did she might end up responsible for a death.

  She found a reason to come round when she had the photographs developed, and they sat upon the floor with the pictures around them in a circle. He looked at them and poured with tears that he could not control, and begged her to make him copies of all of the pictures which featured her, because he did not want to remember any of the others. As she left he saw that she too was crying, and before she went out precipitately, forgetting to close the door, she turned and said in a strangled voice, ‘I am sorry I fucked everything up.’

  He did his best to win her back. He took her out to a meal, but the food had too much pimento sauce in it, and he spoiled it by crying all the way through. She said, ‘This is just like the first meal that we went upon. I did not know what to say then, either.’ He wrote her a very long letter in a defiant mood, telling her that she needed a psychiatrist more than a lover and a friend. He told her that he would be frequently in the capital from now on because he was receiving invitations from clubs and academic bodies to go and address them on the subject of the coca trade, but he would make sure that he resisted the temptation to go and see her. The letter horrified her, and she rushed round in a penitent frame of mind that evaporated as soon as she remembered why she had acted as she had. He wrote her another letter imploring her to explain why she had left him, and she came around with a letter half-finished. Dionisio heard her on the stairs with Janita, who was whispering, ‘What are you going to say? Tell him the truth, idiota, tell him the truth.’