Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  Crazyface uttered a demented yell and brought the stool down across Dionisio’s shoulders. The whole brothel fell into a shocked and expectant silence, and for a few seconds nothing happened. Dionisio stood up and glared at Crazyface balefully. With all the pent-up anger of the inexplicably betrayed he said vehemently, ‘Hijo de puta, your father was a donkey and you are a mule because your mother was a horse who gave rides to everybody.’

  Even Crazyface was shocked, and he did not know what to do. Madame Rosa was about to intervene and ask them to sort it out in the street, when Dionisio overthrew the table and advanced upon Crazyface.

  What ensued was probably the grandest brawl ever seen in a whorehouse outside of the capital. It appears that some people were trying to pull Dionisio off Crazyface. Dionisio was on top of Crazyface and was so angry that he was punching the floor in the mistaken impression that it was the man’s head. There were a lot of people there who wanted to see Crazyface get his just deserts, and they started to pull off the people who were trying to pull Dionisio off. Elbows started to fly, and then fists. Tables were upset and chairs broken over heads. The rooms upstairs emptied and the clients and whores came downstairs in many states of undress to watch, but somehow found themselves involved as well.

  Madame Rosa, with great aplomb, was darting about the room breaking bottles over people’s heads in order to reduce the number of combatants as quickly as possible. Naked whores and nymphets were pulling hair and kicking out at groins, campesinos were waving guns and shooting them at the ceiling so that the adobe plaster was falling in a rain of dust, and sly old men were taking advantage of the mayhem in order to empty the shelves of bottles and transfer them to their mochillas. Meanwhile Rosalita, having disentangled herself from the embrace of Juanito, who had been trying to make love with her behind the bar, ran off to the Police Station to fetch help.

  When Ramon arrived with Agustin the fight was already over. Crazyface was unconscious in the street, having been thrown through the window, and Dionisio was crouching in the middle of the room in an attacking posture demanding at the top of his voice to know whether or not anyone wanted to die, because he, Dionisio Vivo, was ready to oblige. Madame Rosa was waving a bottle and exclaiming, ‘Ay, ay, it was magnificent, but who will pay for the damage?’ Her fat bosom was heaving, her face was glowing with perspiration and excitement, and one of her circular earrings that she wore for a gitano effect had been distorted into an irregular ellipse.

  Ramon took stock of the crushed furniture, the pools of alcohol, the reefs of broken glass, the groaning bodies and cracked lips, and realised that Dionisio was the only one left standing apart from Madame Rosa. He raised an eyebrow after his fashion and called out, ‘Hola, Parmenides, a word with you outside.’

  Dionisio whirled round as if to attack his friend, but when he saw who it was all the anger and aggression left his face and he threw himself about Ramon’s neck. He burst into sobs, and Ramon patted his back and said to Madame Rosa, as if by way of explanation, ‘He is often like this these days.’

  Ramon led Dionisio out and sent Agustin back to the Police Station. In the van Ramon reminisced: ‘Do you remember that time when Jerez called us up to the house because he heard screaming and shouting in your room and thought that you were being murdered, and when we arrived it was you and Anica having a fight with the cushions?’

  Dionisio felt a terrible pang in the space that Anica used to fill, and he moaned and doubled over in his seat. Ramon watched with consternation as his friend wept, and he realised that he had said the wrong thing. He tried another story: ‘Did you know that we had a policeman here once who could hardly read? We were wondering why it was that all his arrests were in the Calle de Marte, and it turned out that whenever he stopped someone he took them to the Calle de Marte to arrest them, because that is the only street in town that he was sure that he knew how to spell on the reports. And we had been thinking that the Calle de Marte must be a new hotspot for crime or something. And did you know that El Jerarca is so bad at reading that he has to pretend he can do it? He tries to run his rackets as though they are a business, and he has board meetings where people take minutes, did you know that? Vale, one day he is standing up addressing the meeting when someone sends him a note saying “Your flies are undone,” and anyway, he looks at the note and says, “Something very important has come up but we don’t have time to discuss it at this meeting, so we will discuss it at the next meeting,” and he hands the note to the secretary and says, “Put this down for discussion next week,” and then goes back to business. That made everyone realise that he couldn’t read, and now they hand him notes which say, “Your mother is a whore, your sister is a lesbian, your sons have no balls, you are a fat stupid shit,” and he pretends to read the notes and he always says, “Something very important has come up but we don’t have time to discuss it this week,” and he hands the notes to the secretary who is taking the minutes.’

  Dionisio was laughing, but outside his house, when Ramon was virtually carrying him in, he turned around and embraced his friend. ‘Ramon,’ he said desperately, ‘I am going loco, and I can’t hold on much longer.’

  Ramon sighed and asked, ‘Have you tried writing to her?’

  ‘It is that which makes me realise that I am mad.’

  Dionisio’s letters had started to change in quality; they had begun to be letters full of anger and reproach, heaping her with culpability, accusing her of betrayal, pleading with her that she should change her mind. Each letter contradicted or qualified the previous one. One would be an hysterical outpouring of bitterness and heartbreak; the next would be a cataract of rage and defamation; the next would be a treatise full of reason, resignation, and tenderness. For a while Anica replied, but she could not bear the pain of her lies, and so she stopped. But that made Dionisio believe that she did not care at all, and he grew worse. Anica read his letters and kept them bound in green and lilac ribbons in a trunk.

  Almost immediately Anica could discern in his letters what appeared to be the commencement of a slide towards insanity. Dionisio too knew that it was happening because there was always a part of him that stood apart and watched it happen. This part would peer from the wings making ironical asides and wry observations; it was able to chronicle with exactitude the moral and intellectual decline that was like a hand of God pushing his head ever deeper and more firmly below the waters.

  It was the most terrifying experience of his entire life, and at its root was his belief that if Anica had rejected him it must have been because he was unworthy of her. He wrote arduous lists of involved and remote possibilities as to what she had found repulsive in him and sent them to Anica, who did not reply. Her silence made him abject. He ran around his house with his face clutched in his hands in a state of desperation and infernal confusion, until he would throw himself upon his bed and the cats would climb up gingerly to lick his face and steady him with their bodies’ warmth, until he fell exhausted into a sleep full of panic and nightmares about beating Anica’s face to a bloody pulp. He would wake up and strike himself on the temples and bite his knuckles in the hope that the pain would restore his reason and provide him with explanations.

  So it was that one empty Sunday, a week after the most memorable brawl in the history of Madame Rosa’s whorehouse, he concluded that he was so base that he would have to improve the world by leaving it. He fetched a rope from his car and tied in it a hangman’s knot. He drove out into the mountains and found a cliff, walking along it in a fever of delirium until he found a tree on the cliff’s edge.

  He put the noose about his neck and climbed up into the tree, barely able to see what he was about on account of the mirages in his eyes. He sat on a limb and tied the rope to it as far out as he could reach. He stayed like that for several minutes in order to steady his mind and to ensure that he died thinking of Anica. Then he let himself drop away sideways.

  But the bough was thin and flexible and the fall did not break his neck. He hung there
with the rope tightening about his throat and he began to feel the fog of obstructed blood clogging up his brain and the unnatural sensation of his tongue swelling in his mouth. His eyes rolled upward and he saw that he was in the womb of Pachamama and that there was a spinning silver light. There was a beautiful young girl with black hair cascading down her back; she was reproaching him and pushing him backwards, and nowhere in the reverberating womb of Pachamama could he find Anica.

  47 The Firedance (5)

  THERE WERE THREE tambos built on the outskirts of the city, installed there by the inhabitants for the benefit of travellers. It was to one of these that Aurelio directed Pedro and Misael when they arrived with the recua of mules.

  Normally one slings hammocks in a tambo, but Aurelio made a bed in there and laid Lazaro upon it. By this time, having been carried so far by the mules, having been cared for and fed upon the itinerary, and having descended to a lower altitude, Lazaro was already feeling much better. But he was so bitterly ashamed of his appalling appearance that he had the strength to resist his confinement and to insist to Aurelio that he be set free.

  ‘Have you seen the soles of your feet?’ asked the Indian, and Lazaro answered in the negative. ‘If you saw the soles of your feet,’ continued Aurelio, ‘you would know that if you walk upon them in these mountains, on these rocks, then they will be destroyed utterly, and if they do not rot off you, then they would have to be cut off, and you would walk nowhere ever again.’ Aurelio showed Lazaro his hands. ‘These hands are cut and scarred from a life of climbing and walking in the sierra. Your hands likewise would have to be cut off if you travel in these parts and bring them to further ruin. You will stay here and I will end your disease.’ Aurelio looked at Lazaro with such certainty and authority that the latter sank back upon the bed. ‘Will I be restored?’ he croaked.

  Aurelio shook his head. ‘I will rid you of these sores, and I will arrest your disease entirely, but I cannot restore what has been lost. Neither will the sensation return where it has gone. I will meditate upon these things later, and perhaps I will think of something. Perhaps a god will come in the form of a bird and whisper to me, but now the important thing is to kill the evil.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I will build your strength. I will take away the cause in your spirit, and then I will make you very ill. I shall make you so ill that you are nearly dead for a long time, but this illness will kill the cause in your body. After that I will do practical things to prevent you from destroying yourself for the lack of pain.’

  For two months Aurelio fed Lazaro on a mush that could pass down his shrunken gullet. It contained ground meat, potatoes, maize, cassava, garlic, and herbs. He made Lazaro drink the juices of mango and guava, lime and lemon, and he made him drink litres of the freezing water that ran down from the mountains and fed the river.

  Every day Aurelio rubbed the body with the oil of avocados until the fishscales softened and began to look like skin. He squeezed citrus juice into the sores and lacerations, killing the infections so that new flesh grew over them, and, when the throat was healed by the paste of honey and vinegar, he removed the tube of cane, and Lazaro found that he could breathe without rasping.

  In the town there was anxiety, and many people said that Lazaro should be driven out before the infection spread. But Aurelio said that only children should keep away from the tambo, because the illness was caught solely by the young. Such was the awe in which he was held that nobody dared to argue, and there were grumblings only behind his back, and that not very often. Don Emmanuel, he of the big belly and the ginger beard, acted with compassion according to his humour by putting it about that Lazaro really had a severe case of syphilis that was past the infectious stage, and some people believed him.

  When Lazaro was cured of the ulcerous obscenities that had blighted his appearance more than anything else, Aurelio summoned Pedro and Misael to the hut for the killing of the cause in the spirit.

  They kindled a fire that filled the place with aromatic smoke, and, when it was very hot, they stripped naked and sat down around it. Lazaro was bidden to sit down with them, and he left his bed to join them. Aurelio passed around a large gourd filled with a bitter tea, and they drank from it in turn until each one of them had drunk a gourdful. The three men began to sing in a low monotonous chant, and Lazaro heard Indian drums even though there was no drummer present. He looked up and found that there was someone else with them whom he could not properly see through his semi-blindness, but it was Aurelio’s daughter, Parlanchina, who always came back from the spirit world at these times and stood behind her father with her long black hair about her waist and her mischievous smile that would have reminded him of Raimunda.

  The world distorted suddenly, and Lazaro was watching from the moon through his belly. Everything turned green, and he felt nauseous because he was being tossed about by a whirlwind full of faces and scarlet macaws. He saw a piranha eaten by a capybara, and a dolphin with reproachful eyes gave him an armadillo with a rotted face and an emerald set in its shell. He screamed when the armadillo turned into a human skeleton that raked at his face with a jaguar’s jaw, and then suddenly he came down from the moon and was lying on his back in the hut.

  The three healers each lit a puro and blew smoke over him. Aurelio put a hand against Lazaro’s stomach and turned it in a corkscrew motion, so that it seemed to disappear inside his belly. He drew it out holding a vampire bat flapping in his grasp, and he cast it into the fire. He repeated the operation and drew out a huge earthworm that he treated likewise. It was still sizzling and shrivelling in the flames when he cast beside it a cipo snake and a huge handful of the parasitic espiga de sangre fungus. Aurelio reached up behind him and the girl gave him the orchid known as ‘The Flower of the Holy Spirit’, which he placed upon Lazaro’s stomach, where it seemed to sink slowly and disappear. They gave Lazaro more ayahuasca and some yague, and he fell into a long dream in which he discovered that his own animal was the hawkhead parrot, and he travelled amid the canopy of the forest observing it through his new eyes.

  On the next day Aurelio demanded of Lazaro whether or not he felt strong enough to see death face to face, and still return alive. Lazaro, not knowing what was in store, said that he was. Aurelio explained to him that his disease preferred to be cool, which was why it always attacks the extremities and keeps away from the scalp, which is the hottest part of the body. ‘I am going to give you a great and terrible fever,’ he told him, ‘and I will make it worse with fire.’

  The old Aymara moved Lazaro to the centre of the room and built up a fire upon either side of him until he felt that he would burn alive and choke in the smoke all at once. Then he made him drink the poison that he had prepared with the barks and herbs that he had gathered in the forest. It tasted oily and sour, and it burned in Lazaro’s stomach as he swallowed it.

  One of the effects of Lazaro’s malady is that one cannot sweat from the affected parts, and one therefore loses some of one’s capacity for cooling down. The combined force of the fever and the fire soon brought him to a state of delirium in which he writhed and twisted, cried out, and trembled, for an entire week. Aurelio placed his hand frequently upon his patient’s brow, and sometimes cooled it with water when it became too heated. In his nightmares Lazaro saw before him a human skull, gigantic in size, with open jaws that snapped at his face and threatened to engulf him. One time he found himself rising up out of his body, and was able to drift through the smoke and away from the tambo, over the mountain. He knelt by the side of a lake and looked at his reflection in the water, seeing himself whole and handsome once more, but then it was as if he had received a message of great urgency, and he went back to the hut and gazed upon the atrocity that was his body, and lay down in it to return to his dreams and his terrible fevers.

  When he awoke at last to see the Indian still beside him and the great fire merely cinders, he felt so ill that he wished that he had died. ‘This always happens,’ said Aurelio, �
�there is nothing to be done. I am afraid that you will find that your cojones have swollen to a terrible size, and will give you agonies, but that will pass. The disease is dead.’ He gave Lazaro water to drink and said, ‘You must sleep a long time.’

  During the days that Lazaro slept, Aurelio himself slept, recovering from the debilitation of staying awake in that inferno for so many days, feeding the fire and keeping death at the distance of a hand’s breadth. At the end of this time, while Lazaro slept still, he made a cast in clay of the soles of each of his patient’s feet. Very carefully he used the casts to fashion shoes.

  The soles were made of car tyres, like anyone else’s, but on those soles he laid a felt made of the wool of a vicuna, compressed into shape with the aid of the casts. He made the uppers of the softest leather from a wild goat.

  When Lazaro was well, Aurelio allowed him to walk for only two hours a day, wearing the shoes. After two weeks he allowed him to walk for only four hours a day wearing them. After a month he allowed him to walk as much as he liked, but he made him show his feet every evening.

  Lazaro had been naked beneath his heavy blankets for all the time that he had been ill, and when he received back his cowl he found that it had been washed, and embroidered with pictures of jaguars and piassaba palms. It was the compassionate labour of Felicidad, the most beautiful and contrary whore in the whole sierra.

  He became a familiar figure in the city, even though no one ever saw his face. He lived alone in his own choza, visited by those who brought him food, and sometimes surrounded by the huge black cats that seemed to sense his loneliness, and did not care about his appearance. The fact was that, however arrested his disease, he still lacked a face, still lacked his fingers and his toes, still lacked the use of his testicles and his manhood, and still carried on his chest his hermaphroditic breasts. He would sit upon the steps of the old palace or at the base of the jaguar obelisks, weeping silently beneath the hood and knowing that he was a freak that no one would ever be able to look at without turning away. Sometimes the little children threw stones at him and shouted out ‘vulture’ after him as he passed. He would ask Aurelio whenever he returned from the forest about how he might be restored, but the Aymara always only ever replied, ‘If there is a way, I do not know it yet.’