Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

by Louis de Bernières

  YOUR REPORTER ARRIVED in Ipasueño with the brief that he should interview the widely-known Dionisio Vivo in order to ascertain from him the reasons for his having ceased to write what have now become known as ‘The Coca Letters’, the editor of La Prensa having become suspicious that Señor Vivo may have been silenced.

  However, I have in the past few days been witness to such extraordinary events that it has been almost impossible for even a reporter of my experience to set them down coherently, or indeed to explain them. I shall simply relate what has occurred here and allow readers to make of them what they will.

  When I arrived here I discovered almost immediately that either nobody knew where Señor Vivo lived, or else they were protecting him from enquiring strangers. Each of my questions was answered with the reply proverbial in these parts of ‘pregunta a las mariposas’. Having been invited to go and ask the butterflies a great many times, I was content to sit in bars where I heard open talk of nobody else.

  From the conversations that I overheard, it appeared that Señor Vivo was a man more of legend than of flesh and blood, for the information that I gleaned was of the kind that one finds in classical encyclopaedias. It appeared that he had thirty sacks of unopened mail awaiting him at the town hall, which of all the information that I collected was by far the least remarkable. The people here believe that he is entirely invulnerable to injury, and that any man who attempts to wound him suffers in his own flesh the wounds intended for Señor Vivo. They believe that he has magical powers to confound all attempts against his life, and that he has already died twice and subsequently arisen from the dead. They say that he has an enormous quantity of children by the women of the camp on the outskirts of the town, all the sons of which bear the same scars about the neck as he himself. I have verified this latter for myself. I should add that the women of the camp did not invite me to go and ask the butterflies, but threatened to throw me down a ravine. Señor Vivo apparently addresses them as ‘sister’, although I found their attitude most unsisterly. Señor Vivo apparently drives an automobile so old that the locals claim that it runs not upon gasoline but upon sorcery. They say that he can become a goat or a lion, cause vines to grow, and has a chariot drawn by tigers. They also believe that when bound his bonds merely drop off. Having managed to talk briefly with some of the students at Ipasueño College I established that he was regarded as an inspirational lecturer who likes to pour scorn upon the very subject that he imparts. I found that Señor Vivo is reputed to be absolutely incorruptible, and that when enraged he is capable of enlarging himself suddenly to a formidable size and ferocious aspect. Furthermore I heard that he is constantly in the company of two extremely large black jaguars that like him are invulnerable to harm, but which eat only for pleasure rather than sustenance. I heard that any man may befriend them who offers them chocolate. I heard that these unusual creatures are a distinct species of cat that derives from a place known as Cochadebajo de los Gatos. At the local police station I asked to be shown the whereabouts of this city, and I was shown in all seriousness a location upon the map which is entirely under water. The word I heard everywhere, in connection with Señor Vivo, was ‘brujo’ and I understood that he was held in very considerable superstitious awe, as well, apparently, as in great affection.

  I decided that the most simple method of making Señor Vivo’s acquaintance was to attend his lectures at Ipasueño College; it is apparently the policy of this college that Señor Vivo’s lectures should be open to the general public, this being a means of enhancing that college’s reputation.

  In the following few days I sedulously attended each of Señor Vivo’s philosophical lectures, at first out of curiosity, but subsequently out of interest. I may impart to our readers a general impression of them all by describing the first.

  The classroom was grossly overcrowded owing to the presence of pupils who were officially enrolled in other classes, and people such as myself who had no official business at the college. Señor Vivo lectured (flanked by his imperturbable cats, of whom more anon) upon the monadology of Leibniz. He expounded this philosopher with such clarity and distinctness, such force and vivacity, such rationality and persuasiveness, that all of us present were rapidly convinced of the indubitable reality of Pre-established Harmony, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Dominant and Subordinate Entelechies, the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, and the Best of All Possible Worlds. Señor Vivo then announced that he was going to prove that it was all m****a (the colloquial vulgarism for excrement), and did so with equal clarity, rationality, and forcefulness. At the conclusion of the lecture those present applauded with manifest enthusiasm, and many stayed behind, thereby preventing Señor Vivo from taking siesta.

  From the college I was able to follow Señor Vivo to his home, but I confess that there was a dignified air about him which absolutely inhibited me from approaching him, and so I contented myself with waiting patiently in the street outside until he should re-emerge.

  He shortly appeared, wearing a very ill-fitting suit of which the trousers were plainly far too long and the jacket too small, which prompted me to reflect that he was one of those people who will always fail to look respectable. He had with him the prodigious cats, a musical instrument that looked like an enormous ornate mandolin, and a sheaf of handwritten music manuscript.

  I followed him to the funeral of one Ramon Dario, a policeman, and, as I discovered, a close personal friend of Señor Vivo. Señor Dario had been gruesomely tortured and then assassinated by the murderous rabble in the employ of Señor Ecobandodo, on the day before my narrative begins. In the middle of the service Señor Vivo, accompanied by four other musicians whom I later determined to have been musical students at Ipasueño College, played a piece of music composed by Señor Vivo himself in honour of his dead friend, entitled Requiem Angelico. This piece of music had a most profound effect upon us all (myself included, who had not even been acquainted with the deceased). It is a piece of the most strikingly singular beauty, consisting of two melodies. The first of these creates in one the sensation of heart-wrenching nostalgia and melancholy, and then very unexpectedly surges into the second, which is victorious and of inexplicable grandeur. From the point when the first melody transformed itself into the second, I can attest that there was not a single face in the whole congregation that did not have tears coursing liberally down its cheeks. Your correspondent confesses without shame that he was not an exception. I enclose herewith a photostat of this piece of music, which was made at my request by an official at the alcaldia, who also made a copy of it for herself.

  The service was unable to proceed for some minutes, owing to the lachrymose condition of the priest, but when the service was concluded and the congregation had proceeded to the interment, Señor Vivo delivered an oration more magnificent even than that delivered by his renowned father over the cortege of General Carlo Maria Fuerte in Valledupar, which your correspondent covered for this organ some eight years ago.

  I passed the night in a somewhat raucous establishment known as ‘Madame Rosa’s’, misleadingly described hereabouts as an ‘hotel’, and in the morning I was sitting in the plaza when I beheld Señor Vivo walking past with the two cats. He was dressed only in a shirt with a belt, which actually had an automatic pistol in it. He had an appearance which I can only describe as messianic, since his hair was quite long, and he had eyes that were not only permanently fixed upon the distance, but which were most astonishingly blue. In considerable trepidation owing to the presence of the cats, which were, I would say, at the very least half a metre longer that the root species, and about four handspans higher, I approached Señor Vivo in order to interview him, but in all the time that I was with him, I failed utterly to induce him to say one word to me. For the first time in my life I felt invisible.

  This did not prevent me, however, from being always in his company, during the dramatic, and, I have to say, incomprehensible events which transpired.

  I followed him to the camp
of ‘Las Locas’, where he was greeted by a woman of Amazonian aspect with a revolver in her belt, who had been one of the original ‘sisters’ who had offered me a brief but impressive trajectory down a ravine. They kissed upon the cheek, and I overheard Señor Vivo saying, ‘Tomorrow, at first light.’

  I then continued to follow him, noting that he walked very like an Indian and had a similar build, until we reached the area known as the ‘Barrio Jerarca’ which was built by the infamous Pablo Ecobandodo in order to house his workers. This area has the best facilities of the whole town, but it has to be said that the taste of almost everything in it is uniformly and grotesquely execrable, being designed to display wealth rather than to perform utilitarian functions. The church is possibly the most gaudy of all in this nation of gaudy churches, and inside it one has the deeply disturbing sensation of being incarcerated in a kind of desperate solitude caused by the voluntary absence of God.

  On that day there was a carnival in progress to mark the anniversary of the birth of Pablo Ecobandodo, who claimed to be in his thirties but was generally thought to be in his late fifties or his early sixties. There was very considerable drunkenness and rowdiness, and this was exacerbated by the fact that there were three brass bands playing simultaneously in apparent competition with each other. I would estimate the number of revellers at about three thousand, of whom a great many were the variety of person that one takes great care to avoid even in daylight in this pernicious nation of brigands.

  As Señor Vivo passed through the mêlée, everything about him fell into silence, and I remarked upon numerous people of no apparent natural sanctity crossing themselves and falling to their knees. Remarkably, Señor Vivo passed through unmolested, and it was clear to me that everyone without exception knew who he was, for which the most evident explanation was the fame of his two cats, which were following behind him, one on either side, glaring at the members of the crowd with such anthropophagous stares that a number of people were injured in the small stampedes that were engendered as a result.

  Señor Ecobandodo was sitting upon a dais, surrounded by priests in voluptuous raiments swinging censers and blessing the crowds of sycophants. But as Señor Vivo approached, a look of concern passed over his face which I would describe as the look of a man at once astonished and terrified. He stood up, revealing himself to be a man of grossly distended girth, and made as if to go to his horse, a grey stallion that was tethered to a nearby lemon tree. But Señor Vivo had interposed himself by a manoeuvre that still I cannot explain, because it seemed to me that he arrived over a distance of seventy-five metres in a few seconds, without varying his steady pace.

  Señor Ecobandodo appeared to be rooted to the spot, and I was able to see the vain attempts that he made to move. At this point one of the many armed bodyguards of the caudillo raised a submachine gun in order to fire at Señor Vivo, but then evidently thought better of it and turned the weapon against the cats. The burst of fire left the cats unharmed, and indeed they jumped at the spurts of dust in the road as if to play with them, but one of the ricochets wounded a woman in the crowd in the thigh. She set up a wailing that added to the tension of the drama that was then enacted before my eyes.

  The two cats sat like guardians upon either side of Señor Ecobandodo, as if to confine him further to the space in which he was trapped. I saw that he had begun to urinate with fear, since a wet patch was spreading across the front of his trousers, and that his face wore a look of panic that was betrayed by. his wildly rolling eyes and his contorting lips. I deduced from this that he was unable to move his head.

  Señor Vivo then, before the eyes of the crowd who were by now uniformly kneeling, removed the automatic pistol from his belt and placed it very slowly between the eyes of Señor Ecobandodo. I then witnessed a phenomenon that again is inexplicable to me, which was that Señor Vivo appeared abruptly to become extremely large. I estimated that his height had increased by a factor of roughly one quarter. I sighted along the top of his head to the lemon tree, only to discover that by such an objective measurement he was exactly the same height as he was before. And yet I have to say that the impression of aggrandisation was quite unmistakable.

  Señor Vivo implacably held the gun against the head of the caudillo, who by now had tears coursing freely down his cheeks, and then did something quite unexpected and quite remarkable. He very slowly put the gun back into his belt.

  Señor Ecobandodo appeared to be considerably relieved, and seemed to be trying to force to his face a smile of ingratiation. He remained, however, incapable of speech. Señor Vivo then raised his hand, and, as if aiming a gun, placed three fingers of his right hand above the heart of his victim. A look first of astonishment and then of agony passed over Señor Ecobandodo’s countenance, and then with a cry of supplication he threw his arms up in the air, whirled about once, and fell prostrate upon the ground. At this point a sigh went up from the crowd whose meaning I found hard to discern, and numerous people threw themselves headlong as if to avoid having to witness any more of these events.

  Señor Vivo went to the lemon tree and untethered the horse. He turned to walk back the way that he had come, and several priests ran to the body in order to administer last rites, but it was plain to all that Señor Ecobandodo was irretrievably dead.

  Señor Vivo progressed slowly through the crowd, who were still silenced except for the keening of the wounded woman, and the grey stallion wandered over to the body of its erstwhile master. It sniffed it briefly, and then turned away and followed Señor Vivo and the two perpetually menacing jaguars, walking behind them with the jewels of its accoutrements sparkling in the light, and the tether of its bridle trailing in the dust. At that point I noticed for the first time that Señor Vivo was wearing what appeared to be a woman’s ring upon the little finger of his left hand.

  A post-mortem conducted upon the same day by the doctors of Señor Ecobandodo revealed an infarction of the heart. But furthermore, the internal collapse of the muscles of the heart rendered even the identification of the working parts of the organ difficult to perform, and one of the doctors compared it to the effects of an exploding bullet.

  I followed Señor Vivo back to the centre of Ipasueño, and then lost him suddenly in the vicinity of the police station. I passed the night in my ‘hotel’, but was woken very early in the morning just before daybreak by the sound of subdued voices in the street and the light of passing lanterns upon the walls of my room.

  I aroused myself and looked out of the shutters, whereupon I saw a small company of the women of the camp passing purposefully by. I dressed hurriedly and followed them at a distance, once again fearing for my life at their hands. The band of women turned up the Calle de la Constitucion, which is the widest residential street of Ipasueño, containing many fine houses. Near the top the women stopped outside one of the houses. By this time the light was breaking, and I was able to see that the Amazonian leader of the women who had threatened me with death was consulting with Señor Vivo, who was accompanied by the two cats and the grey stallion that had been formerly the property of Señor Ecobandodo.

  Señor Vivo looked suddenly in the direction of my concealment behind a tree, and gestured to me to come to him. Filled with embarrassment and consternation I walked as confidently as I could towards him, expecting to be at the very least reprimanded for snooping, but he said nothing to me at all, and I was to draw the conclusion that he merely wanted me to be there to witness the day’s events.

  Señor Vivo went over to a house opposite accompanied by the leader of the women and the two tigres and knocked upon the door. A servant answered it, to whom Señor Vivo spoke. She disappeared and shortly afterwards the occupant of the house appeared wearing his nightclothes. There ensued the following conversation:

  Señor Vivo: Now is the opportunity. Do you have weapons?

  The occupant: I still have a consignment. Do you want them now?

  Señor Vivo: Yes, I do.

  At this point the occupant of the
house appeared to be in some distress, and he put his hand to his forehead and said, ‘So you will pay them for both of us?’

  Señor Vivo replied, ‘You have been living by selling death. You helped to cause her death, but I will do this for us both.’ Señor Vivo indicated the large number of women, many of them armed, who were standing by the gates. The leader of the women gestured to the women to approach, and several of them followed the occupant into the house. They reappeared with two large crates and several smaller boxes that plainly held ammunition. The crates were broken open and Kalashnikov rifles were distributed amongst the women, together with shares of the ammunition.

  Señor Vivo demanded of the occupant to be shown exactly how the weapons were operated, and the former demonstrated it with hands that were visibly trembling and a voice that was hesitant and wavering. Those who had watched the demonstration then passed on the information to groups of the women of the camp.

  The whole band then set off through the town in full public view, for it was now one and a half hours past dawn and many people were about the streets. They stopped outside the police station, and Señor Vivo went in and then came out again with a young policeman who was not wearing his jacket, undoubtedly with the intention that in this way nobody would be able to record the number on his epaulettes. He became the only other male member of the band, myself excepted.

  From this point the riderless horse of Señor Ecobandodo, still fully caparisoned in its ornamented trappings, was at the front of the procession, and I assume in retrospect that this was because the two leaders were following it to its former home at the Hacienda Ecobandoda, although at the time I had the uncomfortable feeling that the horse was actively leading us there.

  We did not arrive at the hacienda until it was already noon, as it is a very long way out of town along a difficult track which for much of the way follows arduous inclines. Having arrived within one kilometre of the hacienda, the exhausted party then left the road and entered a valley which sloped upward and around in a curve, and here they took siesta until the early hours of the evening. I passed this time attempting to interview Señor Vivo, the woman whose name I learned to be Señora Fulgencia Astiz, and some of the other women. The former two declined even to notice my presence, and the remainder of the women either told me to go away and ‘pregunta a las mariposas’ or taunted me by adopting such antisocial tactics as showering me with orange peel and offcuts of pineapple.