Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (7 page)

He thought a great deal about those two little Zambitacholitas over the next few days, and eventually realised that the reason that they had affected him so much was that he had a longing to become a father.

His letter was published a week after its arrival, because
La Prensa
was out of print for a week, because a bomb had destroyed its offices.

THE GOOD THING
about being broadminded and tolerant is that one can take advantage of whatever is in the offing, and, of course, this works both ways. The santeros amongst the people were quite happy to attend Catholic services, and not just because they needed a piece of the Host or a sprinkle of Holy Water for magic, but also because it was good to hear all that chanting, to join in with the hymns, to see the raiment of the priests and the choir and the sacristan, and to see the clouds of incense and the pagan Orishas around the walls of the churches, disguised as Christian Saints in their niches. It was also good to take time off on the Saints’ days.

There were many who were aleyos, people who were not santeros, but who were good Catholics, who were not averse to attending the candombles, and watching the astonishing dances and feats of strength, hearing the veridical prophecies, and seeing at first hand how the yaguos could actually become gods and speak in macabre voices. How good it was to see people foaming at the mouth, convulsing, performing impossible contortions and acrobatics, and how good it was to see the fine raiment of the oluwos and ajigbonas and awaros. It was fine to breathe in the incense and join in the chanting, and only half-deceive oneself into believing that really the Orishas were Santa Barbara and San Lazaro and other saints. And how grand it was to join in with the fiestas of drunkenness and fornication afterwards.

Father Garcia did not join in at all, even though it had been he who had initiated the whole fuss. He had been siezed suddenly by a fierce desire to discover the true identity of St John the Evangelist, and he spent the whole fiesta locked up in his house waiting for the appearance of the Archangel Sandalphon. This formidable celestial being is the manifestation in microprosopus of the Archangel Metatron, and Father Garcia believed that this angel was party to secret information about the author of the fourth gospel. He spent four days, bleary-eyed and praying, before there appeared before his gaze a tatty specimen. This angel was hook-nosed and senile, with crumpled feathers hopping with fleas. The nimbus about its head was of a greyish pallor, it salivated copiously through its missing teeth, and it could not remember its name when Garcia demanded to know it. In disgust, the latter threw open his door with the intention of wasting no more time upon this pitiful creature and of joining in with the festivities, only to find that they were already all over. He went to take a few copas at Consuelo’s whorehouse, and when he came back the angel was still there, sitting quietly in a corner with an air of dejection. Garcia looked at it with a certain sympathy and said, ‘You may as well go now.’

‘Where to?’ demanded the angel, in Hebrew.

‘Heaven?’ suggested Garcia, in Latin.

The angel sighed and made a rueful face. ‘Can’t I stay here?’ it asked. But Garcia shook his head and it rose not ungracefully to the ceiling, and faded away. Father Garcia shrugged resignedly, and made a note in his book: ‘It appears that angels fall into decrepidation when not gainfully employed. I wonder whether all this concentration gives one hallucinations. Or can it be listening to too many Colombian stories?’

Most of the rest of the aleyos found a way to be useful during the celebration. Don Emmanuel, with his rufous beard, his impressive belly, and his flair for ribaldry, made pantagruelian quantities of guarapo, involving hundreds of pineapple skins, which he served with a gourd and his usual good humour. Françoise and Antoine Le Moing, who, along with Dona Constanza, were among the few other white people in the city, grilled fish and served it up on palm leaves with rice. Dona Constanza and Gloria made a vast sancocho with fifty chickens in two cauldrons, and wore themselves out with all the plucking, the drawing of entrails, the cubing of cassava, and the washing of potatoes. Professor Luis and his wife, Farides, ran a hangover rescue service, delivering lemon juice sweetened with chancaca to those who lay moaning in the streets from the effects of chacta, chiche, aguardiente and ron cana. All the time Professor Luis was clucking to himself about all the liver damage that was going on, but on the last day he too became famously drunk, and climbed up onto the roof of the Palace of the Lords. He sang ‘El Preso Numero Nueve’ at the top of his voice and then collapsed, so that Hectoro and Josef had to climb up there as well and lower him down with a lasso.

Remedios, who used to be a communist guerrilla leader and who had never given up her martial frame of mind, patrolled the city with a Kalashnikov accompanied by her enamorado, the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura. This latter had been unfrozen by Aurelio, having been dead beneath an avalanche for four hundred years, and although he no longer wore his armour very often he was still confused by his new lease of life. He followed Remedios about, waving his sword, remonstrating with disorderly characters in his archaic Spanish, and helping her to break up fights. He never was to feel at home in the twentieth century until the day when he was to recognise his own ring upon Dionisio Vivo’s finger and discover that he had met one of his own descendants.

Capitan Papagato, who was at that time just beginning his romance with the young and beautiful Francesca, changed the bambuco and vallenato records on the gramophone that Professor Luis had rigged up to his windmill, and managed to kiss Francesca a great many times in between. The last unbeliever, General Fuerte, who was thought to be dead but had in fact deserted the army, decided during the fiesta to collect observations about his countrymen with the same thoroughness and objectivity as he had always displayed in collecting information about his country’s butterflies and hummingbirds. He wandered about with a notebook, followed by his huge cat, collecting anthropological data about alcoholic consumption and patterns of promiscuity. He jotted down an exchange that he heard between Don Emmanuel and the voluptuous Felicidad.

Don Emmanuel had said, ‘I believe in that proverb that a man cannot make love to every woman in the world, but he ought to try.’ Felicidad had laughed her inimitably wanton laugh and replied, ‘A woman has more sense; she knows when she has found the best lover in the world, and she stays with him.’

‘You have never stayed with anyone.’

Felicidad smiled and said, ‘But no one can accuse me of not looking very hard.’

General Fuerte wrote down, ‘I have never really noticed before, while I was in the army, but truly this country is one huge bed of love.’

ANICA HAD BEEN
plotting to give Dionisio a joke present ever since he had given her a perfume bottle which in fact contained a substance that smelled of dogfart.

She went to a crazy old Indian who earned a living by carving perfect representations of different kinds of turds out of clay, which he then glazed and fired, and sold on a tray not far from Madame Rosa’s. Then she went to a shop of medicines and bought a child’s fingerstall in transparent rubber. This she rolled up and placed in a tiny little box. On the box she wrote ‘Para mi Amigo pequeño’, and then she wrapped it carefully in green tissue.

She came round and stood in Dionisio’s room, and said, ‘Look, I have got you a present.’ By the way that she was trying not to smile, he knew that something suspicious was going on, and he said ‘OK, this is a joke?’ She grinned her huge grin despite trying not to, and said, ‘Open and see.’

He tugged at the wrapping, and found the small red box. ‘For my little friend,’ he read. Then he opened it and found what appeared to be an extraordinarily small condom nestling in the cotton wool. ‘Oh, bastarda, really it is not so small as that. You are a rat, and . . .’ but he was lost for words, and he pretended to pummel her in the stomach while she put her hands on her hips and laughed.

‘I do not mean it,’ she said.

‘No one has ever complained,’ he announced, pretending to be offended, and putting on a childish pout. ‘I have not either,’ she said, putting her arms around him, ‘I am very pleased with it.’

‘You should know,’ said Dionisio, ‘that all over the world every little boy is born with a measure in his sweaty little hand. Now you have destroyed my confidence.’

‘Well, now you should stop calling me “Bugsita” just because I have big teeth, OK? Listen, I nearly forgot, my father gave me a little note to give to you.’

He was astonished. ‘Your father?’ He took the envelope and opened it. It was written in a copperplate hand in brown ink, on very fine quality paper. There was no greeting:

I have heard that you are a very fine young man, albeit with some unusual opinions, and I have noted how much happier my daughter has been since she has known you. Most fathers would have intervened by now to forbid their daughter any further contact, because I am well aware that Anica is keeping unacceptably irregular hours, and is alone with you unchaperoned in a manner that a few years ago would have caused a great scandal.

However, I have tried to be a ‘modern’ father to my daughters, and I do not interfere with their free-will even though I disapprove of most of what they do and say and believe. I do not interfere because I suffered too greatly with the interference of my own family, who nearly prevented me from marrying Anica’s mother. I will not put myself between you, also, because it causes me great delight to see Anica happy for the first time since her mother’s death.

But I must warn you that certain people have approached me, and that I am certain that your life is imperilled. I tell you this in the strictest confidence, and you must not tell anyone under any circumstances that I have given you this information, not even Anica. As you are with Anica for much of the time, it goes without saying that I am terrified on her behalf in case she becomes an incidental victim of whatever is going to happen. I beg you for her sake to take care, and to cease to meddle in affairs which are beyond your power to comprehend in their entirety. She has told me about the time that you nearly killed two thieves who threatened you both, but you must know that physical courage will not be enough to save you from these people.’

‘What does it say?’ asked Anica. Dionisio fumbled in his mind for something that would put her off completely: ‘He wants to know my opinion as professor of Secular Philosophy on St Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God.’

‘Ay,’ she exclaimed. ‘That stinks. Please do not explain it to me.’

‘Please tell your father that I have noted very carefully what he says, and that I will think about it with the utmost seriousness.’

‘Listen, we have to go to Janita’s because my Norton is there, and I cannot make it go at all.’

Anica’s ‘Norton’ was a very old two-stroke moped to which some previous owner had fixed an incongruous fuel tank from an old Norton. It looked most bizarre, but it was very practical because the moped used almost no fuel and the tank was enormous, which meant that it hardly ever had to be filled up. Unaware that Jerez was still in the house, Dionisio took some tools, and locked the door as they left.

The two roadblockers were turning housebreaker. Similarly unaware that Jerez was still in the house, fast asleep after a night of heavy marijuana smoking, they broke down the front door with a crash. Jerez awoke with a jump, heard the men careering up the stairs, and with great presence of mind hid himself in his cupboard. The two men seemed to know which room was Dionisio’s, for they were in and out of it and back down the stairs in a flash.

When Jerez was sure that they were gone, he crept out of the cupboard and very carefully opened the door of Dionisio’s room, because he suspected the possibility of a bomb. There was only a sack on the bed, with a note pinned to it. It was a parody of the warning on the side of cigarette packets: ‘Las Autoridades Sanitarias advierten que:
PARTICIPAR EN UNA CRUZADA PERJUDICA SERIAMENTE LA SALUD
.’ In smaller writing it said, ‘Dinero, es mejor.’ Jerez read this to himself very slowly, out loud: ‘The health authorities advise that crusading can seriously damage your health. Money is better.’

Jerez felt the sack, and realised that it contained wads of banknotes. He opened the sack, and found that in it were more pesos than Dionisio could have earned in two entire lifetimes of teaching secular philosophy. He sat on the bed for an hour with his head in his hands, and could not think of a single reason why anyone should ever know that he had taken it. So he took it. He hid it in the same cupboard in which he had hidden himself.

It was Anica who pointed out that the door had been kicked off its lock, and Dionisio ran upstairs, fully expecting to find some kind of catastrophe. But instead he found Jerez with his feet on the table eating his way through a sancocho. ‘I am sorry about the door,’ he said, ‘I forgot my keys and I was desperate to get in for a shit.’

‘I always said we should hide a key in the garden,’ remarked Dionisio. He went to his room and, while looking for something else, found a few pesos under a book on the table. He came back with them triumphantly, and suggested that they all go and get some fried cassava and some Mexican burritos from the shop down the hill.

Later on, back at the house, Jerez came in and found the lovers wrapped in each other’s arms on the couch. ‘You two never give up, do you,’ he said. ‘Do you never stop?’ Anica stood up and straightened her clothing, and Jerez said, ‘Would it not be funny if you two got married? You could put all your names together: “Montes Sosa Vivo Moreno.” It sounds good.’

Anica pulled a face, perhaps of pain, perhaps of pleasure, and said, ‘Who said anything about marriage?’ Dionisio began to think about it.

Jerez pretended that he had to go away for a long time on an assignment, and he disappeared with some of the bag of money. He went to Rio and Caracas and gambled some of it, and spent the rest on the highest-class and most expensive whores he could find. He returned with the most intractable cocktail of venereal diseases that the doctors at the clinic had ever encountered, and they forbade him to sleep with a woman for six months at the very least. He decided to wait until Dionisio was dead before he spent the rest of it. Like everyone else he believed that this would happen sooner rather than later.