Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  On the vast plain outside the capital were countless carnation greenhouses, where workers travailed in appalling humidity amidst clouds of carcinogenic chemical fertilisers and insecticides, producing perfect white flowers to adorn the lapels of wedding guests all over Europe, to grace the statues of saints in churches, to decorate the corpses of the freshly dead, and to fill out the bouquets of hopeful lovers.

  The two assassins took Anica to a derelict greenhouse long abandoned because of the disease. El Chiquitin jabbed into her neck the submachine gun that her own father had sold to El Jerarca, and marched her into the building while EI Guacamayo got out from the capacious trunk of the Ford Falcon his comprehensive bag of tools. Because it was growing dark he also brought in a lantern for them to work by.

  El Guacamayo was wearing his magenta trousers, vermilion shirt, yellow shoes, and a magnum under his orange jacket. He looked at Anica while he ran his comb through his oiled hair and prepared himself mentally for the job at hand. She was still holding her portfolio, but then El Chiquitin unexpectedly tore it away from her and let its contents slip to the floor. El Guacamayo glanced down at the cheerful patterns of zigzags and commented, ‘Very pretty, flaca. Like you.’ He approached her and put his hand under her chin to lift her head. He inspected her with professional disinterest. ‘Nice eyes.’

  Anica found her voice at last, and said, ‘Leave me alone. What do you want from me?’

  El Guacamayo pulled out his magnum and cocked it. He pointed it at her forehead and said, ‘Kneel.’ Behind her, El Chiquitin reached up and tried to pull her down to her knees. She resisted until she saw the finger taking up first pressure on the magnum. She knelt, and felt again the submachine gun in the back of her neck. She was trembling, and her eyes were rolling to the side as if to seek an escape.

  El Guacamayo reached down and undid his fly. ‘I’ll tell you what I want, guapacita. I want a good blowjob, and just for your information, the more fun we get from you the more minutes you get added to your life.’

  From behind her El Chiquitin added in his squeaky voice, ‘And our advice is to enjoy it, flaca, because this is your last chance to amuse a man or two.’

  Anica looked at the erect penis before her face, with its purplish head and its fluid already glistening. She felt sick. El Guacamayo moved forward and tried to place it against her lips, but she wrenched her head sideways and began to heave. El Chiquitin took hold of her hair and pulled her head back up, forcing her face forward.

  But Anica was bigger than El Chiquitin, and stronger. She struggled fiercely and managed to rise and pull away from him. Desperately she ran up the greenhouse, only to find herself in a corner. The men approached her like two predators upon a calf, and very deliberately El Guacamayo crippled her by shooting her through one knee while El Chiquitin knocked her unconscious with a blow to the side of the head with a timber that he had pulled from the decaying structure.

  El Guacamayo went for his bag of tools, and from it he took a butcher’s knife. Deftly, in only a few strokes, he cut Anica’s clothes away from her body, and then bent down to feel her breath against his face. ‘I never fuck corpses,’ he said, and El Chiquitin replied, ‘Why not, if they are still warm?’ so that El Guacamayo laughed and showed his teeth again.

  El Guacamayo took some lard from his bag and smeared it between her legs. He took first turn and El Chiquitin went second. Both men came very quickly because absolute power is a piquant aphrodisiac, and because neither of them had had any need to learn to be a good lover. On the second occasion they took their time. In between hammering relentlessly against her body, they took breaks for cigarettes and a few doses of cane rum, and chatted about how she compared to all the others they had done this to over the years. They even had time to get nostalgic about the first time they had done it, to a twelve-year-old girl from the little pueblo, except that she had not been unconscious and had cried all the time. ‘The younger the sweeter,’ said El Guacamayo, and his partner said, ‘All the same, this is a good one.’

  When El Guacamayo had finally come a second time and El Chiquitin had pretended that he had, they looked down at her and thought about what to do next. They went to the bag and got out their aprons. El Guacamayo was very particular about not spoiling his clothes, and the other always copied him, out of solidarity and out of a sense of inferiority.

  ‘Al reves?’ inquired the latter, and El Guacamayo said, ‘Yes, inside-out.’

  They busied themselves about the task of cutting. ‘You know the noise it makes when you take off the ears? Well it reminds me of the sound you get inside your head when there is sand in your food. It crunches.’

  ‘I’m going to give her a big smile. Which knife is best for the lips?’

  ‘I want the chisel for the top of the nose, OK? Can you pass it?’

  ‘Shall I take out the eyes?’

  ‘No, she has pretty eyes, and anyway, sometimes they burst and you get that black stuff everywhere. Just give her a stare, OK?’ So they cut off her eyelids and added them to the pile.

  ‘Nice ring,’ said El Chiquitin, who pulled it off the finger that he had just severed. ‘It fits, look,’ and he held up his little finger, upon which Anica’s mother’s engagement ring was now glistening in the lamplight. ‘Pretty,’ said El Guacamayo. ‘There is something to be said for being small after all, eh cabron? Shall we keep the earring?’

  ‘It’s only plastic,’ said El Chiquitin, adding the scalp to the pile. ‘I am going to have a breast, so I can have a drawstring pouch like yours, the one you made from that daughter of the man we cut the hand from.’

  ‘Take the right one, it’s bigger.’

  When they had in a neat but bloody heap Anica’s fingers, toes, ears, eyelids, lips, nose, front teeth, vulva, scalp, and left breast, they stood up and wiped their hands on the shreds of her turquoise clothing so that they could take a cigarette break and admire the result of their transformation. Anica was still breathing, and the blood around the cavities of her face was frothing.

  El Guacamayo took the knife that he had taken from the man they had butchered in Bucaramanga, and knelt down. He felt the blade for keenness and then sliced across her belly so that they could stuff into her all those parts of her body that this time took the place of the white cockerel that normally goes into the womb of a pregnant woman.

  Then El Chiquitin took the knife and sliced expertly under her chin so that the tongue could be pulled out without severing a vital artery. They stood up again, and El Guacamayo said a little despondently, ‘This is like going to whores. After a while the pleasure diminishes.’

  The assassins urinated in turn over her wounds, and El Chiquitin said, as he always did, ‘Urine is antibiotic, cabron,’ so that El Guacamayo would give vent to his usual chuckle, deep in the throat.

  ‘Shall we finish her off?’

  ‘No need, friend, she will bleed well enough. And anyway, if she survived the doctors would kill her out of mercy, and if they did not, she would kill herself for the shame of looking like that. It’s a pity, she was a good-looker.’

  ‘She was too tall. I like them shorter than that.’

  El Chiquitin wrapped the right breast in the remains of her shirt, and once again they wiped their hands on the shreds of her scattered clothing. They returned to their Ford Falcon with the sensation of a job well done, and drove to a bar so that they could take a break before going on to their next one.

  50 Leticia Aragon (3)

  IGNORANT OF WHAT had happened to Anica and conscious only of his rejection, Dionisio Vivo collected memories and sorted them into chronological order. He collected stones two at a time. Two from an avalanche that had come down upon them when they were playing tejo, two from the road where they had gone running, two from beneath the tree of the bird that serenaded them at dawn, two from the park where he had recited a Gabriela Mistral poem about the beauties of nature, two from a place where he had almost been swept away by the current, two from the alley where they had defeated th
e thieves, two from the secret cave where they had found the shoe, two from outside the improbable Chinese restaurant, two from the place where they had met Aurelio, Misael, and the two black jaguars of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, two from outside the bar of the sicario’s bungled assassination attempt, two from outside the clinic where he had received the elephant’s dosage of antivenereal cocktail through the veterinary needle, two from his parents’ house in Valledupar and two from the garden of the Naked Admiral and his researching wife.

  He labelled all of these stones, and one of each pair he wrapped up in green paper and put in a box for Anica.

  If Dionisio was condemned to misery on account of love, there is no doubt whatsoever that he was also saved by it. There is a kind of psychic telegraph that exists amongst those who live close to their emotions and are not afraid to express them, and so it was that without formal arrangement of any kind the members of his family would telephone him or write to him in rotation so that there was hardly a day when he did not receive direct evidence that he was not as vile and unadorable as he believed. His father wrote to him lengthily advising steadfastness, persistence, courage, and all the other underrated military virtues. His mother wrote to him epistles full of maternal compassion and informing him of the minute details of daily routine of which life is really composed, so that even in his utmost desolation he would know that today Mama Julia was going to make guava jam and then put a new bandage on the wounded puma. His sisters telephoned him and listened for hours to his ramblings before inviting him to come and stay so that he could be restored to life by his nieces and nephews, who, to the consternation of their mothers, would take rides on the glossy backs of his two giant black jaguars, and would force him to pretend to be a tree so that they could clamber amongst his branches. The Naked Admiral and his wife sent him books about the history of Caribbean Naval Warfare and a facsimile of the biography of Cristobal Colon written by his son Hernando who had accompanied him on his fourth voyage in 1502.

  At the College his students miraculously transformed themselves into the bright-eyed darlings of a disillusioned professor’s most unattainable dream. He had never taught so brilliantly in his life; he began to receive protests from other members of staff that their students of Chemistry, their students of Unknown and Impracticable Languages, their students of Recondite Botany with joint-honours Mediaeval Byzantine Hydraulics, were all abandoning the lectures that they had been reading from the same yellowed notes for thirty years, and were swelling the classes of Dionisio Vivo who always began his lectures with: ‘I do not want you to believe any of this because it is all crap, but it is the crap in which the piles of our pseudo-European culture are embedded, so you had better understand it because no one who does not understand the history and taxonomy of crap will ever come to know the difference between crap and pseudocrap and non-crap . . .’

  His classes of smiling girls and callow boys applauded at the end of his orations and brought him presents of pineapples and panela, and souvenirs of holidays wrapped up in nasal tissue, and they stayed behind after school hours so that he could explain again the principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, the Aristotelian Square of Non-Contradiction, the Empirically Real and Transcendentally Ideal Forms of Intuition, the Malicious Cartesian Daemon, the Hegelian Dialectic of the Inexorable March Towards the Absolute and its Marxist Dialectical-Materialist Inversion, the Argument for the Existence of God from the Nature of Necessary Truths, the Cultural Significance of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and whether or not there was a Possible World in which there was a town so like Macondo that in fact it actually was Macondo.

  The girls in his classes fell in love with him in such a way as to be perpetually confused as to whether it was on account of his redeemer’s sorrow or his remote atmosphere, and the boys wondered at the horrendous livid scar of the rope and the gash, and fell in love with his myth of indestructibility and his living legend of praeternatural machismo, so that there was not one of them who would not have wished to be him as he lectured upon the basis of pseudo-European culture in crap, with his two gigantic black jaguars sitting impassively on either side of him.

  From the time when they were two very small comical gatitos with hoarse voices and destructive needle claws that had to be clipped twice a week in order not to leave the house in four-tracked shreds, to the time when they were so enormous that Dionisio had to improvise a sunroof in his car so that they could continue their kittenish preoccupation with back-seat driving and swiping at low-flying birds, the tigres were the mainstay of Dionisio’s life. He took them everywhere even at the risk of summary arrest by INDERENA and the attempted kidnaps by the opportunist black-marketeers of the pelts of endangered species. They followed behind him at a thoughtful pace, and their indecipherable unblinking stare won unbelievable discounted bargains from the intimidated owners of shops and stalls who felt hypnotised into giving their master the best possible quality at wholesale prices. The cats pinned him to his bed at night with the weight of their resonant purring, their intoxicating odour of strawberries that was nowadays mingled with that of fresh hay, and their solidified dreams of the emerald paradise of the jungle in which there wandered unresisting tapirs whose succulent flesh tasted of the most expensive Swiss chocolate.

  It was the tigres who, when he was watching from his window with the taste of volcanic ash in his mouth Anica’s blank window on her twenty-first birthday, with one accord went up on their hindlegs and forced him to the floor so that he would roll around with them in a mock-battle laughing in between his fits of loss. And it was the cats who brought Leticia Aragon.

  When Leticia arrived with a bag of her things claiming that the cats had dragged her by the sleeve all the way from the camp, Dionisio did not believe her because he had not let the cats out and had been playing with them minutes before by tickling their whiskers with the feather of a troupial. But Leticia was there at the door all the same, flanked by the cats.

  Leticia was one of the ephemeridae of the human race. She had the fragility of a porcelain twig and the colours of a hummingbird. Her hair was as fine as cobweb and as black as onyx, and her eyes seemed to have no colour of their own but changed according to the refraction of the light. Her Venusian clothes hung upon her in such a way as to intimate that her natural state was nakedness in starlit forests, and when Dionisio formally shook her proferred hand it felt as though it was made not of flesh but out of coagulated light. ‘I have come to stay,’ she said, and then added, as if explaining some obscure point, ‘I am a virgin.’

  When Leticia left for Cochadebajo de los Gatos six months later with Dionisio’s second child stirring in her womb, he was unable to remember anything about her that might have established who she was. But he knew that he had treated her appallingly and that she had never wept or even reproached him. She had always known that when he made love to her it was really to someone else, and she had agreed when he had said that if her child was a girl she should call it Anica. Only Leticia knew what it was that she had been doing for all those months.

  She left leaving a note which said ‘Now you should go to the other women. I have loved you without possessing nor being possessed, and that is the way it will always be.’ She tied red cords with interwoven gold wire about the necks of the cats as a farewell present, at roughly the time that Anica would have given birth.

  51 The Firedance (6)

  IT WAS NOT obvious to the people of Ipasueño what Lazaro was; his face, his hands and his legs were concealed in his monk’s habit, and the special shoes hid his feet. It was true that he walked in spasmodic jerks and that his voice was like that of a vulture, but it was common to see things such as that, and who knew if there were not some good reason for his voice?

  Everybody knew, however, that there was something out of the ordinary about Lazaro. Some said that he was an omen of death and that he had been seen carrying a scythe, and some said that he was a monk of a mendicant order. But others would say that no, a mendicant does not have a
n embroidered habit, and especially not a habit embroidered with jaguars and palms. He was a mystery, but perhaps not so much unlike all the other beggars who collected in the plaza or on the steps of the churches to gather alms.

  Lazaro slept with some of the other beggars in the crypt of the church where Don Innocencio was cura. This priest had begun to lose the wealthy and respectable members of his congregation at exactly the time when he had started to preach the universal brotherhood of God’s children, and had expounded the duty of the fortunate in the family to succour the less. He had lost them completely when he had begun himself to practise as he preached, and harbour the destitute in the crypt. Some of the scandalised respectable people even went so far as to attend El Jerarca’s tasteless temple in the coca barrio rather than sit in the same church as the indigent.

  In the company of beggars Lazaro learned something about humanity. There were some who were perfectly strong and healthy, but who hated work and responsibility, preferring poverty and carefree improvisation. Others were mad, and were clinging to reality only by the tips of their fingernails. Some were the victims of the most atrocious mistreatment by landlords or spouses, and some were fugitives of the law in some other department, who had arrived with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Others were those too sick or lame to work, who were begging just during the time that it would take them to die forgotten in a corner of the town. There were those who were alcoholic or in the terminal stages of coca dependency, who were easily confused with the insane, and who were more than likely to die suddenly of drinking rat-poison or gasoline. There were the mentally retarded, who lived permanently confused, and who were victimised and exploited the most by the other beggars, and it was for these that Lazaro felt the most pity, for they were the most likely to die from unnecessary accidents and self-neglect.

  The company of the beggars called themselves ‘Los Olvidados’, not only because they were non-existent in the eyes of the world, but also because they themselves forgot who and what they were. For each one of them the memories of family and childhood seemed to pertain to another reality belonging to someone else. Those who had been strong and happy had been so, as it were, in a life before this one that had nothing any longer to do with it. For many of them, to be forgotten was all that they demanded of the world.